project description | Acoustics Research Centre

Project: I Hear You! A new hearing service in Tanzania

March 31, 2017January 2, 2017 by Acoustics Research Centre

Sharleen is an African girl, 9 years old, from a family of farmers. She is quite smart, but no longer goes to school.

Why?

Sharleen has a hearing impairment, and couldn’t understand what the teacher was saying. Her father thought he needed her at home to look after the goats. Unfortunately, Sharleen is just one among many children lacking help.

WHO has estimated that over 5% of the world population – 360 million people – has a hearing impairment (328 million adult and 32 million children), and the majority of children with hearing impairment live in low-income countries. In contrast, less than 2% of the hearing aids produced in 2005 went to low income countries.

Traditional hearing devices are advanced equipment; expensive, fragile and not developed for the Third World. Specialised personnel and complex infrastructure in the individual fitting process is needed, reducing the usefulness of such complex hearing aids to a minimum in low-income countries, where trained people and specialists are scarce.

With funding from Norwegian Research Council, SINTEF’s project “I Hear You”, starting early 2017, aims to help children like Sharleen by ensuring access to education for the hearing impaired.

Project: Next Step

November 16, 2015November 16, 2015 by Tron Vedul Tronstad

Noise induced hearing loss (NIHL) is one of the most common occupational diseases. This is a fact even if most countries have legislations specifying how much sound employees can be exposed to. Therefore new models for NIHL seem to be necessary to reduce the risk of developing hearing disorders.

In the Norwegian petroleum industry much attention has been paid to occupational noise and hearing damage in the last decade. Statoil ASA has, in collaboration with Honeywell, been involved in several projects at SINTEF with this in mind. The current ongoing project is called Next Step (Noise Exposure Tackled Safely Through Ear Protection).

MAUS: Auralisation of outdoor noise

November 5, 2015April 27, 2015 by Erlend Magnus Viggen

Imagine that a new road was planned for construction close to your house. Naturally, you might want to know how much this would impact the noise situation in the area where you live. Currently, what the developers would be able to tell you are numbers called equivalent levels that describe the noise increase in your area. While these numbers may be based on excellent simulations and may be entirely correct, numbers are no substitute for listening!

Project: Aircraft noise annoyance in Norway

November 5, 2015April 8, 2015 by Femke Gelderblom

Aircraft noise unquestionably causes annoyance, but reactions to a given noise exposure vary wildly. The Norwegian Defence Estates Agency and SINTEF ICT Acoustics have teamed up to strengthen the connection between the aircraft noise situation and the annoyance response of airport neighbours.

For this purpose, we have assessed annoyance due to aircraft noise in Norway, by conducting noise annoyance surveys near five Norwegian airports. Respondents were asked about their annoyance from aircraft noise directly, but they also got questions that were more specific, like:

When during the day are you most annoyed by aircraft noise?
What kind of flight activities do you consider specifically annoying?

The aim of the research project is to use the obtained data to explain why respondents in different communities respond differently to the same noise dose.

MOVE: Monitoring the noise from individual vehicles in traffic

November 5, 2015March 23, 2015 by Truls Berge

In the research project MOVE, ARC is investigating methods and systems to estimate the environmental impact of road traffic. The project is financed by the Norwegian Research Council, through the BIA program. MOVE is managed by Acoustic One/Norsonic AS and SINTEF; other partners are NTNU and Norsk Elektro Optikk AS (NEO). The project started in 2012 and will be finished in 2015.