Determination of noise induced hearing loss in mining: an application of hierarchical loglinear modelling

Abstract

The levels of noise arise from mining industry seem to be higher when compared to other industries. For this reason, noise exposure and noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) are prevalent in mining. Assessment of noise emission levels that arise from various mining operations is required to prevent and minimize the NIHL. Because the studies for preventing occupational hearing loss among miners are inadequate, a quarry and stone crushing-screening plant was selected to generate site-specific data. The noise levels of the environments in which workers work were measured and also a hearing test centre applied hearing tests to the workers. According to the hearing test results, it was determined that the part of workers have hearing loss. The main factors affecting the NIHL were assumed as experience, noise level, miners' age and occupation, and by taking into account the sub factors of the main factors, multi way contingency tables were prepared. Then hierarchical loglinear analysis method was implemented to categorized data; thus, the probabilities might effect NIHL was investigated. At the end of this study, it was found that the most risky occupation group was the drivers, and additionally, these workers were mostly exposed to 70-79 dB(A) noise level. When the important interactions are evaluated, it is determined that 4-11 years experienced crusher workers have high probability of NIHL because of high exposure to 90-99 dB(A) noise level. Moreover, the most important interactions which may affect the NIHL were identified and the precautions to reduce hearing loss were presented.

Short review on occupational noise exposure in the extractive industry and similar works

“…Except for one study that takes place in the construction field (Lee, Kim, & Hong, 2019), every other paper set is related to the mining industry, where the exploited commodities varied between marble (Melo Neto, Kohlman Rabbani, Barkokébas Junior, Lago, & Jonathas, 2012) to aggregates (Onder, Onder, & Mutlu, 2012) and andesite (Kosała & Stępień, 2016), limestone (Çınar & Şensöğüt, 2019), coal (Simion, Kovacs, Toth, Ilie, & Gireadă, 2017) and lignite (Srivastava, Gupta, Srivastava, & Kaur, 2010), chromite (Kerketta, Gartia, & Bagh, 2012), copper (Lilic et al, 2018) and iron (Lokhande et al, 2017).…”

“…Given that this study's aim is related to occupational exposure to noise, the experimental data was classified according to the measurement setting, which is provided in Table 1, divided into activity, equipment, job category, and working area. (Srivastava et al, 2010) x (Gupta, Roy, & A. Rajan B, 2012) x (Kerketta et al, 2012) x (Melo Neto et al, 2012) x (Onder et al, 2012) x (Cinar & Sensogut, 2013) x (Gyamfi, Amankwaa, Owusu Sekyere, & Boateng, 2016) x (Kosała & Stępień, 2016) x x (Lokhande et al, 2017) x (Simion et al, 2017) x (Lilic et al, 2018) x (Wichers et al, 2018) x (Çınar & Şensöğüt, 2019) (Lee et al, 2019) x (Mihut, 2019) x…”

“…Only two studies recorded noise related to job category (Melo Neto et al, 2012;Onder et al, 2012). Melo Neto et al (2012) experimental protocol was applied at two marble finishing plants, where polisher workers were exposed to equivalent continuous sound pressure levels between 99 and 105 dB(A) and cutting workers were exposed to noise levels between 100 and 101 dB(A).…”

“…Only comparable data was used in this work as some of the articles presented their results in graphic form. The job category was created to answer two studies that analysed personal noise level exposure of polisher worker and cutter worker (Melo Neto et al, 2012), and crusher worker, drilling operator, driver, mining machine operator and weighter (Onder et al, 2012). Commercial and industrial zone, mines, and haulage road were mentioned as the understudy working areas (Kerketta et al, 2012;Lokhande et al, 2017).…”

Models for Estimating the Hearing Threshold of Quarry Workers at High Frequencies

“…Studies have shown age decrements in performance of sustained attention tasks. Onder et al, (2012) studied NIHL in mines at Turkey. They had applied statistical analysis (hierarchical log-linear) of the data.…”