Auditory Display and Personal Protective Equipment

Auditory Display

• Auditory display is used in various applications such as car navigation systems, alarm systems, and virtual reality.
• Examples of auditory display include car navigation systems that use voice commands or sounds to guide drivers and alarm systems that use distinct sounds to signal alerts.

Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

• Examples of PPE include hearing protection devices such as noise-canceling headphones.

General Principles of Auditory Display

• Compatibility: the ability of an auditory display to work together with other displays
• Approximation: the ability of an auditory display to approximate the display of complex data
• Dissociability: the ability of an auditory display to separate different data streams
• Parsimony: the simplicity and clarity of an auditory display
• Invariance: the consistency of an auditory display regardless of the environment

Key Concepts

• Timbre differentiation: using different timbres or tones for different types of auditory cues or signals to make them distinguishable and easily recognizable.
• Auditory display: frequently used for alerting, warnings, and alarm situations in which the information occurs randomly and requires immediate attention.
• Occupational Safety and Health Organizations' guideline: 85 decibels is the maximum permissible noise level for an eight-hour workday.

Other Key Facts

• Temporary Threshold Shift (TTS): temporary hearing loss or tinnitus experienced when exposed to extreme bouts of loud noise.
• Example of auditory display: a washing machine that plays a melodic chime or tune to indicate when the cycle is complete.

Importance of Auditory Sense

• Auditory sense plays a critical role in communication, allowing us to perceive and interpret spoken language, music, and other sounds in our environment.

Sonification

• Example of sonification: a seismograph that represents seismic data as sound to better understand the data.