‘This is just the future, isn’t it?’ is a phrase Dr David Greenberg, has heard a lot. As the founder of Eave, he’s developed and brought to market technology that delivers hearing protection with sound monitoring, giving employers and duty holders a level of oversight that wasn’t available before. We asked him about his journey so far and what’s next for Eave.
A career in hearing protection was a natural path for David, who worked as a clinical audiologist in the NHS after growing up with family members who had hearing loss. “My grandma worked in a factory in the London Underground during World War Two. She was only 20 at the time and obviously there was no hearing protection in a very loud, reverberant environment.
“That experience meant that I always knew her with two hearing aids and severe hearing loss. What I found was that, one to one, she was an incredibly lively, intelligent, interesting person. But in a group environment, when there was a lot of family and background noise, she would just sort of fade into the background. Later in her life she developed dementia, which was linked to her hearing loss and the isolation that comes with hearing loss and a lack of brain stimulation. She had challenges with communication as a result.
“Later in life I realised how much of an impact that had on me in my formative years and that’s why I wanted to go into healthcare and help people who were affected by hearing loss. We all need to work, but what if your work causes you to have health problems that prevent you from working? That’s incredibly unfair.”
The path to prevention
Working in the NHS, David became frustrated with the focus on services treating people who were already experiencing hearing loss, rather than working to prevent the condition. Studies have explored the idea that what is currently viewed as age related hearing loss is simply accumulated noise induced hearing loss, and the World Health Organisation estimates that 50% of hearing loss is preventable, so it’s a valid argument. David said, “Prevention is so easy when it comes to hearing loss. With a shift in the collective focus of how we approach deafness and hearing loss we could significantly improve the impact on people’s lives and the burden on NHS services.”
David completed a PhD in auditory neuroscience and worked in research before he decided to develop something where he could work with people to have a direct and positive impact on their hearing at work. Fascinated by the science of how to prevent sounds from damaging a person’s hearing, he left the NHS to set up Eave.
He explained, “I’d lived the experience from so many different angles; in my family, academically, clinically, I had a good understanding of the hearing aid technologies out there, and I felt like no one was doing what I thought was the right thing.”
Eave developed a hearable device that performs different functions; an innovative ear defender designed to enhance safety in noisy environments, combining advanced sound amplification and noise reduction in one. These devices allow people to stay connected and have conversations with people around them, while also safeguarding their hearing and monitoring sound levels at the same time.
Eave’s Peak management platform, which takes the data from its headsets, provides digital site maps overlaid with noise levels, so that duty holders can see which areas need mandatory hearing protection where to focus on reducing noise. The system will also send notifications when workers are not wearing protection or when a person exceeds the allowable limit of 85 decibels (in the UK).
The construction industry has welcomed the technology, and in the nine years since Eave was set up it has gone on to become the chosen partner of a broad range of organisations, such as Ferrovial Construction at Heathrow, Galliford Try Highways for National Highways, BAM for Network Rail, and both Costain-Stanska joint venture and Eiffage-Kier-Ferrovial-BAM joint venture for HS2.
Working together to protect workers’ hearing
The risks of noise exposure at work are well known and can cause irreversible hearing damage. Industrial hearing loss remains the occupational disease with the highest number of civil claims, accounting for around 75% of all occupational disease claims.
The economic burden of disabling hearing loss in the UK adult population is estimated to be about £25.5 billion each year. Before the pandemic, noise induced hearing loss was reported to account for ~11% of all non-fatal occupational illnesses in the US (equivalent data are currently not available in the UK).
As well as working at Eave, David is active in his passion to drive change to protect hearing loss in other areas of society. As a Trustee and Non-Executive Director of the UK Hearing Conservation Association he works with industry leaders to educate and improve regulatory recognition of the risks around hearing loss and is currently supporting the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in its workplace noise intervention programme, which will see 500 inspectors carry out checks at thousands of sites in the next 12 months. In the first phase of this multi-year campaign, inspectors will focus on assessing duty holders’ management of hearing protection on site, using the acronym CUFF, which stands for:
- C – Condition. Is the hearing protection in good order and well maintained?
- U – Use. Are the employees using the hearing protection when needed?
- F – Fit the ear. Have the employees fitted their hearing protection properly?
- F – Fit for purpose. Is the hearing protection correctly specified? Is the attenuation excessive, causing a safety risk?
“At the recent UKHCA annual general meeting, Eave was noted as a driving force behind this campaign and that’s amazing. I have been part of conversations about taking action to prevent hearing loss over many years, and for an influential industry body like the HSE to go beyond education or guidance and to act this way is a big outcome and will influence decision makers to change how they think about and prioritise noise.”
What’s next for Eave?
Dr Greenberg has plans for Eave’s upward trajectory to continue, with new products and innovations in the pipeline, field testing plans and a move to accelerate distribution through a business model that will make Eave products more accessible across the country and internationally.
He explained, “We’ve seen excellent growth in construction and part of that is down to support from our investors, as well as more companies taking action to protect their workers from noise induced hearing loss. We’re now seeing interest from different areas and industries, and we know there are a lot of businesses that can benefit from our technology. Essentially, we want to help anyone who wants to improve how they manage the risk of noise induced hearing loss in their workforce.
“On a wider scale, I would love to see passive hearing protection banned from the workplace; single use plastics, foam earplugs, sound blocking headphones. They can be dangerous and have been extensively proven to not provide the expected level of protection, plus they’re not a sustainable option. They are a cheap option used by a proportion of businesses, so banning them is the only way to get rid of them.
“Finally, I would also love to see, weirdly, more competition. We don’t want our products to be an exceptional solution, we want them to be business as usual. If everyone starts talking about smart hearing protection, electronic hearing protection and hearing protection with hear-through technology, it will significantly change the landscape for the better.”
To find out more about Dr David Greenberg and Eave’s products, visit www.eave.io
