Ear Audit

Want to know if you’ve damaged your ears? Check your hearing risk and hearing ability online.

Why take the Ear Audit?

The world is a noisy place. Many of the ways we spend our leisure time – nightclubs, gigs, motorbikes, DIY, earphones – could damage our hearing if taken to excess.

Potential effects include difficulty hearing clearly in noisy places and tinnitus (ringing in your ears). The WHO estimates that 1.1 billion young people’s ears are at risk.

But this is just an estimate, and some people’s ears could be more vulnerable than others. So we’ve developed the Ear Audit: an online tool that lets anyone calculate their hearing risk and check for warning signs of hearing damage.

What is the Ear Audit?

This easy web tool gathers info on:

• who you are (age, gender, ethnicity)
• whether you experience tinnitus, what kind, and how often
• what noisy activities you’ve done over the years
• how you perform on an 8-minute hearing test

It’s all pretty simple, and you can skip any parts that don’t interest you. You’ll spend a minimum of 3 minutes and a maximum of 25 minutes on the Ear Audit, depending on which parts you choose to do (and how noisy your life has been!)

At every stage, you’ll learn how your results compare to other people. The data will also allow us scientists to better understand which activities and timings are damaging and who is most at risk.

Take the Ear Audit

Ear Audit will be ready for public use soon.