About 120 million workers worldwide are at risk of developing professional hearing loss (WHO, 2001). Hearing protection devices (HPD) such as earplugs (EP) represent the most frequently used short term solution to protect employees that are exposed to harmful noise levels. Nevertheless, research has also shown that workers often only tend to wear provided EPs for limited amounts of time (Berger, 2000) due to physical and auditory discomfort. One important source of auditory discomfort is the occlusion effect (OE). The OE occurs upon EP insertion and causes an uncomfortable distortion of the perception of the wearer’s own voice and an amplification of physiological noises. Numerical modeling can contribute to further our understanding of the sound propagation in the external ear and ultimately the OE’s underlying mechanisms. The present study aims at implementing a two-level fractional factorial design to examine how the material properties of the external ear tissues influence numerical predictions of the OE.
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