Bionic Ear Cuffs Could Stop Soldier Hearing Loss, Save VA Hospitals $1 Billion, with Mary Roach

With a really loud noise like an M-16 is 160 dB, and something that loud, just a second or two, or a split second worth of exposure can cause some hearing damage. Whereas if you're talking about like a noisy street, a loud restaurant, 85 dB, you could be exposed for eight hours before you'd start to run a risk.

So it's a combination of how loud it is and how long you're exposed. So it's a huge problem in the military. It's the number one expense that the VA deals with. It's a billion dollars a year for hearing loss and tinnitus for hearing disabilities. And you think well, duh, put in earplugs or ear cuffs. And that's great until you need to communicate; you need to hear somebody yelling, "Get down!" or "There's someone over there." These are pretty important things to hear, and so the idea is that you want to be able to protect hearing but also preserve what they call situational awareness, like what's going on around you.

Because about 50 percent of that comes from hearing, even somebody riding a bike down the street, so a lot of it is you're aware of things by sound, even if you don't realize that. So the military's challenge has been to come up with a way to protect hearing but also enable you to hear more quiet places.

In special operations, they have something that they're using, which is really cool. It's these ear cuffs that magically—well, not magically; it's technology—but they attenuate loud noise, they minimize loud noises. They sense something that's over a certain decibel level, cut that, but amplify quiet noises like a human voice. So you put these on, and when they're switched on, it's kind of amazing. You're kind of like the Bionic Woman; you're able to hear a conversation across the street.

So that's the challenge of military hearing. The other thing that's tough is that when a really loud noise starts happening, there's no warning. So you could be going along for hours in a convoy, and there's not any firefight or anything going on, but suddenly an IED goes off, so you don't have any warning to put on or in your ear protection.

So that's the other challenge, and it's hard to convince a soldier to wear a heavy headset the entire eight hours that they're driving somewhere. Somebody put it as the military doesn't have a noise problem; they have a quiet problem because a lot of times it's not loud, but suddenly it's loud and you don't have the time, and now your hearing is blown.

Like so many military technologies, it's something that may start out with a specific military application, but it finds its way to the civilian world. And I actually want a pair just to put on in the subway and eavesdrop to the other end of the car. When I was young, there was a show, The Bionic Woman, and I'm dating how ancient I am, but one of the things was she was in a tragic accident and she was rebuilt, and they gave her bionic hearing.

And you'd see her kind of go like beep, beep, beep, and then she would be able to hear conversations, like the bad guy across the street having a conversation. This is what these things do. It's pretty spectacular.