Occupational Performance of Hearing-Impaired and Normal-Hearing Workers in Korea

Background and Objectives@#This study aimed to investigate the occupational performance of Korean workers with and without hearing loss and analyze the hearing-related difficulties in the working environment. @*Subjects and Methods@#The Amsterdam checklist for hearing and work was used for the analyses and the occupational environments of the Korean workers were investigated. Out of 129 total participants, 86 workers experienced severe to profound hearing loss and 43 had the normal hearing ability. The hearing-impaired workers were recruited from two leading vocational centers and normal-hearing workers were their colleagues. @*Results@#The hearing-impaired workers were found to take fewer sick leaves and exhibited higher rates of permanent job statuses compared to the normal-hearing workers. Workers with hearing loss rarely detected background sound; however, they could perceive reverberation more frequently. They felt more satisfied with their careers than the normal hearing workers as they received social support and needed to put their effort into hearing for most hearing activities. Furthermore, the effort in hearing increased with the increase in job demand, job control, social support, and career satisfaction. The working hours per week increased with the increase in age, education level, job demand, job control, and social support. Different trends were observed in 9 out of 12 variables while comparing the data from the present study with that obtained from the hearing-impaired workers of the Netherlands, indicating a large difference between countries. @*Conclusions@#Although the hearing-impaired Korean workers operate diligently with good job positions, it is necessary to enhance their acoustic environment and provide them social support. Considering the cultural background of the hearing-impaired workers, the development of suitable vocational rehabilitation programs and specific questionnaires is strongly recommended worldwide.

Analysis of Output Levels of an MP3 Player: Effects of Earphone Type, Music Genre, and Listening Duration

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: To prevent noise induced hearing losses caused by listening to music with personal listening devices for young adults, this study was aimed to measure output levels of an MP3 and to identify preferred listening levels (PLLs) depending on earphone types, music genres, and listening durations. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: Twenty-two normal hearing young adults (mean=18.82, standard deviation=0.57) participated. Each participant was asked to select his or her most PLLs when listened to Korean ballade or dance music with an earbud or an over-the-ear earphone for 30 or 60 minutes. One side of earphone was connected to the participant’s better ear and the other side was connected to a sound level meter via a 2 or 6 cc-couplers. Depending on earphone types, music genres, and listening durations, loudness A-weighted equivalent (LAeq) and loudness maximum time-weighted with A-frequency sound levels in dBA were measured. RESULTS: Neither main nor interaction effects of the PLLs among the three factors were significant. Overall output levels of earbuds were about 10-12 dBA greater than those of over-the-ear earphones. The PLLs were 1.73 dBA greater for earbuds than over-the-ear earphones. The average PLL for ballad was higher than for dance music. The PLLs at LAeq for both music genres were the greatest at 0.5 kHz followed by 1, 0.25, 2, 4, 0.125, 8 kHz in the order. CONCLUSIONS: The PLLs were not different significantly when listening to Korean ballad or dance music as functions of earphone types, music genres, and listening durations. However, over-the-ear earphones seemed to be more suitable to prevent noise induce hearing loss when listening to music, showing lower PLLs, possibly due to isolation from the background noise by covering ears.

Acoustic Features and Cortical Auditory Evoked Potentials according to Emotional Statues of /u/, /a/, /i/ Vowels

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Although Ling 6 sounds are often used in the rehabilitation process, its acoustic features have not been fully analyzed and represented in cortical responses. Current study was aimed to analyze acoustic features according to gender and emotional statuses of core vowels of Ling 6 sounds, /u/, /a/, and /i/. Cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) were also observed in those vowels. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: Vowel sounds /u/, /a/, and /i/ out of Ling 6 sounds representing low, middle and high frequencies were recorded from normal 20 young adults. The participants watched relevant videos for 4-5 minutes in order for them to sympathize emotions with anger (A), happiness (H), and sadness (S) before producing vowels. And without any emotional salience, neutrally production was performed. The recording was extracted for 500 ms to select pure vowel portion of production. For analysis of CAEP, the latencies and amplitudes of P1, N1, P2, N2, N1-P2 were analyzed. RESULTS: Intensities of /u/, /a/, and /i/ were 61.47, 63.38, and 60.55 dB. The intensities of neutral (N), H, A, S were 60.60, 65.43, 64.21, and 55.75 dB for vowel /u/, vowel /a/ were 61.80, 68.98, 66.50, and 56.23 dB, and vowel /i/ were 59.34, 64.90, 61.90, and 56.05 dB. The statistical significances for vowel and emotion were found but not for gender. The fundamental frequency (F0) of vowels for N, A, H, and S were 168.04, 174.93, 182.72, and 149.76 Hz and the first formant were 743.75, 815.59, 823.32, and 667.62 Hz. The statistical significance of F0 was found by vowel, emotion, and gender. The latencies and amplitudes of CAEP components did not show any statistical significance according to vowel. CONCLUSIONS: Ling 6 sounds should be produced consistently in the rehabilitation process for considering their difference of intensities and frequencies according to speaker’s emotions and gender. The vowels seemed to be interpreted as tonal stimuli for CAEP components of this study with similar acoustic features among them. Careful selection of materials is necessary to observe meaningful conclusion of CAEP measurement with vowel stimuli.

Literature Review of Listening Effort Using Subjective Scaling / 대한이비인후과학회지

Listening effort is defined as a listener's mental exertion required to understand a speaker's auditory message, especially when distracting conditions are present. This review paper analyzed several subjective scaling tools used to measure the listening effort in order to suggest the best tool for use with hearing-impaired listeners who have to expend much effort even in everyday life. We first explained the importance of measuring listening effort and discussed various kinds of measurements. We then analyzed and categorized 15 recently published articles (i.e., from 2014 to 2016) into three topics: performance and listening effort, listening effort and fatigue, and clinical implication of listening effort. We compared the articles in terms of pros and cons and also identified 10 tools for use in the subjective scaling. Although none of these tools were unified or standardized easily, we concluded that 7-point scale would be the most reasonable as a less time-consuming measurement for compartmentalizing the degree of listening effort. If used with objective tools for measuring the listening effort, the subjective scaling could be a powerful tool for clinical use.