Basic Study on the Mechanism of Earphone Hearing Loss: About Correlation between Ear Age and Real Age

Abstract

Young people around the world are at risk of the earphone hearing loss. To prevent the risk, authors have been studying on the mechanism of the earphone hearing loss in the laboratory since 2010. In the present paper, earphone hearing tests to 46 subjects are carried out to obtain the ear age compared with the real age. The ear deterioration index is proposed to evaluate the effect of earphones quantitatively. For reference, both their accumulated earphone usage time and their favorite genre of the sound source are collected from the subjects to calculate the approximately accumulated sound energy received in their life. The results are as follows. The younger the real age is, the older the ear age is. The ear ages of subjects under the age of 45 exceeds the real ages. The ear degradation index tends to be worse with the accumulated earphone usage time. Ear ages of junior high school boys aged between 13 and 14 are remarkably old. The earphone hearing loss can be explained by the concept of the fatigue fracture.

Keywords

• ear age
• audiogram and sound source
• earphone hearing loss
• fatigue fracture
• high frequency