Date: Apr 26, 2007 Author: Ryan McBride Source: bizjournals (
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Enemy mortar rounds exploded within 30 meters of the humvee in which Massachusetts Army National Guard Sgt. Jamey Barton sat, near a checkpoint in Iraq three years ago, and the sound from the blast was like "someone sticking a firecracker in your ear and letting it go off," he said.
While Barton is just one example of a soldier facing potential hearing loss, a Harvard University researcher had soldiers like him in mind when he invented an earplug designed to block high-decibel noises such as explosions -- without muting nearby voices and other sounds a soldier needs to hear.
Hearing Armor LLC, a startup based in Needham, was founded in recent months to commercialize the new earplug. Rick Rogers, lead inventor of the company's earplug and a senior researcher at Harvard School of Public Health, has recruited veteran health-care attorney Jason Dunn to serve as president of the firm.
The startup's earplugs look like tiny, translucent mushrooms with tan tubes inserted in the centers. They are designed to reduce so-called impact noises of greater than 110 decibels, according to the company, while allowing ambient sounds of less than 12 decibels. Dunn declined to provide details on the specific materials used to achieve this apparent advancement in earplug design.
The military has reason to take notice of Hearing Armor's product.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs reports that disability costs among all branches of the military due to hearing damage totaled $901.5 million in 2006 -- a huge increase from the $548.1 million in 2003, the year the war in Iraq began. The department said about 60 percent of those costs were from the U.S. Army, which provides the country's primary ground forces in Iraq.
Dunn said existing military earplugs go unused because soldiers find them difficult to wear during combat. He may be right.
The National Guard's Barton had earplugs to wear in combat during the year he spent in Iraq, he said, but he quickly ditched them after he realized the earplugs blocked sounds he needed to hear for survival. "It hurt my hearing in the long run," he added.
Still, Hearing Armor faces steep competition. Aearo Co., an Indianapolis-based maker of safety products, makes the E-A-R combat earplug for the U.S. military. And the military has recommended use of the E-A-R earplug, according to an Army website, as a base model upon which advances in hearing protection could be added.
Meantime, Dunn -- who had been general counsel for Waltham's Private Healthcare Systems Inc. until shortly after the health insurer was acquired by New York-based MultiPlan Inc. last summer -- is on the hunt for about $1.2 million in seed money to manufacture a small batch of the earplugs for field testing. Unlike medical devices, Dunn said earplugs require safety clearance from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rather than the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Though industrial workers are another likely market for the startup's earplugs, Dunn said, "we are endeavoring to get these moved along as soon as possible so they can get in the hands of the military."
