A Study on Auditory Status of School Going Children Residing Near Railway Track
With the increase in transportation of both men and material, railway transport noise is increasing; having significant influence on environment and human life and may affect the children being regularly exposed to it. In this backdrop, the present study
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A Study on Auditory Status of School Going Children Residing Near Railway Track Chatterjee Sandipan, Chatterjee Ayan, Chatterjee Surjani, Santra Tanaya, Mondal Prosun, Banerjee Neepa and Mukherjee Shankarashis
Abstract With the increase in transportation of both men and material, railway transport noise is increasing; having significant influence on environment and human life and may affect the children being regularly exposed to it. In this backdrop, the present study was conducted to assess the impact of railway noise, if any, on auditory status and annoyance level of school going children residing and attending school near railway track. The study was conducted on 42 suburban and 30 urban adolescent females (age 16–18 years), respectively, constituting exposed group 1 and 2 (EG1 and 2) residing in and around Kolkata. 81 females of comparable age, residing in the relatively calm and quiet rural area constituted the control group (CG). The sound pressure level was recorded in different parts of the institutions, where the study was carried out. Audiometric assessment was carried out in comparatively calm and quiet room and the degree of hearing impairment was calculated. The annoyance level was assessed. The results indicate that, EG1 and EG2 individuals had significant (P < 0.05) hearing loss at low and high frequency compared to CG individuals. From the present study, it may be concluded that, school children residing in the vicinity of railway tracks are suffering from bilateral hearing impairment with adverse impact on their annoyance level.
Keywords Hearing impairment Bengalee adolescent females Hearing threshold Traffic noise Annoyance Audiometry
C. Sandipan C. Ayan C. Surjani S. Tanaya M. Prosun B. Neepa M. Shankarashis (&) Human Performance Analytics and Facilitation Unit, Department of Physiology, University Colleges of Science and Technology, University of Calcutta, Rashbehari Shiksha Prangan, 92 Acharya Prafulla Chandra Road, Kolkata 700009, India e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018 G.G. Ray et al. (eds.), Ergonomics in Caring for People, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4980-4_11
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1 Introduction School is an important micro-environment in children’s life as they spend a considerable amount of time there everyday. Any environmental perturbation including noise in the vicinity has a chance of adversely affecting their cognitive development [1]. As along with urbanization, transportation facilities are also on the rise, increasing the number of highway and railway tracks at the vicinity of populated areas; even sometimes compromising with the public health issues and safety factors [5], noise, particularly from transportation, has become a serious concern [12, 13, 24, 26, 27, 30]. In this backdrop, present study has been conducted to assess the impact of railway noise, if any, on auditory status and annoyance level of female school going children residing and attending school near busy railway tracks in suburban an
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