Listening to music with personal listening devices: monitoring the noise dose using a smartphone application

Abstract

Objectives. To monitor listening habits to personal listening devices (PLDs) using a smartphone application and to compare actual listening habits to self-report data. Design. Two stages: self-report listening habits questionnaire, and real-time monitoring of listening habits through a smartphone application. Study sample. Overall 117 participants aged 18–34 years (mean 25.5 years) completed the questionnaire, and of them, 40 participants (mean age: 25.2 years) were monitored for listening habits during two weeks. Results. Questionnaire main findings indicated that most of the participants reported listening for 4–7 days a week, for at least 30 min at high listening levels with volume control settings at 75–100%. Monitored data showed that actual listening days per week were 1.5–6.5 d, with mean continuous time of 1.56 h, and mean volume control setting of 7.39 (on a scale of 1–15). Eight participants (22%) were found to exceed the 100% noise dose at least once during the monitoring period. One participant (2.7%) exceeded the weekly 100% daily noise dose. Correlations between actual measurements and self-report data were low to moderate. Conclusions. Results confirmed the feasibility of monitoring listening habits by a smartphone application, and underscore the need for such a tool to enable safe listening behaviour.

Key Words:

• Behavioural measures
• hearing conservation
• instrumentation
• noise

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to N. Bartal, research assistance in the Department of Communication Disorders, Sackler faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, for her assistance in collecting the data.

The study was partially supported by an internal fund of the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University.

Declaration of interest

All authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Supplementary material available online