Further research to understand impact of hearing loss on fitness for duty among service personnel

Matthew Blyth has been recruited as a PhD student to join fellow postgraduate researchers Hannah Semeraro and Zoe Bevis in developing effective tests of hearing-related fitness for duty for servicemen and women. The tests will ultimately be used to determine if individuals are fit to return to active service, move to light duties or be discharged.

The latest award of £100,000 from the MoD Royal Centre for Defence Medicine, in collaboration with the Institute of Naval Medicine, builds on an existing £180,000 project. It has been awarded to Dr Daniel Rowan and Dr Rachel van Besouw from ISVR and Professor Simon Liversedge from the Centre for Vision and Cognition in Psychology at the University of Southampton. Dr Ben Lineton from ISVR is also involved in the project.

"The current test assesses hearing loss by asking people to listen out for the sound of a whistle in the quiet; it was developed a long time ago and was causing concern even in the late 1940s," explains Daniel. "We are working on two new tests that requires people to understand speech in background noise and to identify where a gunshot is coming from. We believe they will be far more useful for assessing fitness for duty than the current test."

Alongside assessments of hearing loss, the project is examining how individuals process and prioritise information from various senses, a concept known to the military as ‘situational awareness', and the effects of hearing loss on that.