Nowadays call centres have a very important role in the daily activities of commerce and providers of services in the public sector. Potentially, one of the risks to the health and safety of the telephone operators is damage to hearing due to the prolonged use of their personal communication headset (i.e., comprising microphone and small speakers fitted the operator's head) and the levels noise that they expose the users to. A headset can be considered as a type noise source such as circum-aural, supra-aural and plug in the ear. Despite telephone equipment having a limited bandwidth, these headsets can generate wideband noise of high quality and fidelity that implies a wide dynamic range. The sound level of the headsets should be sufficiently high to overcome the effects of any background noise in the operator's workspace and is particularly relevant when unilateral and/or supra-aural type of headset are used. However, it appears that there is a lack of national and international standards with agreed methodologies to quantify exposure of telephone headset noise typical of that experienced by operators in call centres. This paper presents a procedure for the assessment of operator exposure to noise from headsets typical of those used in the telemarketing industry. Researchers at the Laboratory of Industrial Noise (LARI) of the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil, have developed the procedure. Using a standardized ear simulator and artificial human head, the procedure consists of measuring simultaneously the sound signal that the telephone operator receives and that which ear simulator measures. This method was evaluated using approximately 30 call centre operator subjects in four different workspaces and two different times of the day to represent varying conditions of background noise.
展开▼
