Diver Hearing Protection System

Although helmeted divers are routinely exposed to noise levels that pose an increased risk of hearing damage, modern dive helmets do not include additional hearing protection. Noise sources from underwater tools, breathing noise, and high-volume communications all contribute to a dangerous noise environment inside the helmet. Creare has teamed with the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo to address this issue by improving the hearing protection provided by dive helmets, reducing the self-noise generated in the helmets, and developing a technique for measuring the attenuation performance of these helmets. Our Diver Hearing Protection System (DHPS) will focus on cost-effective upgrades to current helmet designs and will be integrated with helmet communications. Our measurement approach makes use of Creare"s unique acoustic test fixture, an anatomically accurate head simulator that enables measurement of the attenuation performance of a helmet for both air- and bone conducted sound transmission paths. In Phase I, we will evaluate a commercial dive helmet and then implement a prototype DHPS system and measure its performance. In Phase II, we will perform further design, build, and test cycles to refine our system, and we will conduct a series of human subject tests to validate its performance.