WORKPLACE health risk prevention expert Reactec has teamed up with hearing protection tech specialists Minuendo to help companies actively prevent hearing damage in their workforce.
Norway-based Minuendo has developed an ear plug called Smart Alert which not only provides protection from noise but also monitors the level of noise entering the ear.
Smart Alert informs a user in real time of their noise exposure based on monitoring and warns them if they are protected against that noise.
With this integrated noise device, companies can actively protect the health and wellbeing of individual workers by engineering out risk through this wearable technology.
Jacqui McLaughlin, CEO of Edinburgh-based Reactec said: “Our collaboration with Minuendo is exciting and is fully complementary with our existing workplace and wearables technology that is all designed to help prevent harm, not just respond to issues afterwards.
“We know that traditional PPE does not provide information about an individual’s level of protection or exposure to noise and now, armed with Smart Alert and Reactec’s cloud-based analytics, companies can actively protect the health and wellbeing of their workplaces.”
This collaboration between Reactec and Minuendo allows companies to access the data from the Smart Alert device automatically within the Reactec Analytics platform and to align noise exposure with the other data that Reactec collects – such as vibration exposure through the use of power tools.
Some of the key benefits of Smart Alert include earplugs with natural sound which will allow users to maintain situational awareness and the ability to communicate with co-workers and noise exposure alerts which provide real-time feedback which encourages safe behaviour.
A digital record of noise exposure for every employee is gathered automatically too.
Neal Muggleton, COO of Minuendo said: “Passive protection methods do not help safety managers and employers to tackle the problem of hearing loss in the workplace.
“By contrast, our new Smart Alert solution is proactive: giving employees warnings and updates on their exposure, alerting safety managers to any issues, and giving employers a total record of each employee’s noise exposure over time.
“By combining the noise exposure data gathered by Smart Alert with other criteria through the Reactec platform, safety managers can gain unparalleled insights to help identify those most at risk, so that timely interventions can be made.
“This is a major step forward in tackling noise-related hearing loss in the workplace.”
