Now Hear This

CSD Research Focuses on Hearing Loss From Electronic Devices

Light a fire cracker and listen to it go off. Hear that? That painful noise is 125 decibels, and it’s the type of thing that could cause permanent hearing loss.

What concerns Dr. Denise Tucker, a professor in Communication Sciences and Disorders who specializes in tinnitus and noise-induced hearing loss, is that the decibel (dB) level of a firecracker is comparable to the full-volume level of some personal electronic devices, such as iPods.

An iPod, at full-volume, is about 120-125 dB and Dell Latitude Laptops is 112-114 dB.

Dr. Tucker, who is working with other departments at the university and professors at two other universities, is conducting a study of college-aged adults to determine how much they use things like cell phones, digital music players, walkmans, and other personal electronic devices, and how much that use may contribute to hearing loss.

Her research consists of two phases. First, she surveys students to determine what devices they use, how often they use them, etc. Then she takes some of those students and tests them for noise-induced hearing loss.

Even the results of her pilot study are interesting.

"I went into this thinking that iPods would be the device that they used the most, that would be the most threat," she said. "It's not. It's cell phones."

Among the students she surveyed as part of the preliminary research, about one third owned iPods or similar digital music devices while 97 percent used cell phones.

One student in the preliminary research showed hearing loss in one ear. Which ear? The one that she uses to talk on her cell phone.

And it's not just the decibel volume, it's also the time volume. The amount of time that we spend with electronic devices adds up, Tucker said. One girl said she talked on her cell phone as much as 10 hours a day. Add another 2 hours on a digital music device, and that's half the day.

"That really adds up quickly," Dr. Tucker said.

Dr. Tucker's work comes on the heels of a much-reported study by the American Speech-Language Hearing Association and Zogby International Survey, which found more than half of high school students had noise-induced hearing loss. That loss was attributed, at least in part to electronic devices. But that study focused only on high-school students. Dr. Tucker is interested in college-aged students.

Now Dr. Tucker is using the pilot study to apply for a National Institute of Health grant, which she hopes she'll get in order to broaden the study and survey more than 2,000 students and test a number of those.

She is working with Dr. Susan Phillips, also in Communication Sciences and Disorders at UNCG, Joyce Ferguson in the Department of Communication, Dr. William Martin of the Oregon Health Science University and Dr. Bruce Ganzenter at the University of Virginia.

Tucker, the principal investigator on the project, hopes to hear about the NIH grant by this fall.