Functional Hearing Evaluation For Military Occupational Specialties

Communication requirements vary widely across Military Occupational Specialties (MOS) and mission readiness depends on the applicant’s ability to perform their jobs safely and efficiently. Some specialties require the soldier to perform hearing-critical tasks that may take place in non-optimal environments. These hearing abilities are not currently appropriately assessed with existing audiology tools which rely primarily on standard auditory thresholds. Creare proposes to develop, test, and deliver a portable Functional Hearing Assessment Tool to determine if an individual meets hearing-critical measures sufficient to be assigned to or remain in a particular job, or if hearing aids or hearing protection compromise hearing-related MOS requirements. The tool will include several hearing tests including speech intelligibility in noise, sound localization and detection, and automated thresholds with specific pass/fail criteria associated with each MOS. We will also develop a systematic approach to identify hearing-critical tasks, set performance parameters for these tasks, and relate functional hearing ability to scores on standardized hearing tests.