How intercom systems can help you prevent hearing loss

Intercom systems are widely associated with live production and broadcast environments. But there are actually many adjacent markets where they can be put to good use.

The transportation, warehousing, manufacturing, medical, marine, and energy sectors all need clear and reliable communication, not to mention other utilities, like water and sewerage companies.

Broadly speaking, the need for intercom solutions in these sectors arises out of concern for life safety and increasingly hearing safety. And by and large, while they need highly ruggedised products, they are typically going to use the same solutions you would find in live entertainment or broadcasting.

“Luckily, most of our endpoints designed for live performance-based activities are well suited to other ruggedised requirements,” says Bob Boster, president of intercom systems manufacturer Clear-Com, speaking at this year’s IBC trade show. “Frankly, theatre technicians tend to be fairly aggressive in the way they work with these tools and they’re not widely different from the way someone might use them if they’re on the shop floor of a manufacturer.”

One key thing to know about these other sectors is that they are looking for communications that are full duplex because safety requirements are not adequately covered by a walkie-talkie workflow. Why so? “Because if there’s some kind of emergency, you can’t interrupt the person who’s droning on and on, like I am answering this question,” Boster replies.

But there’s more to these sectors’ needs than simply not having a system where an end user is still holding down the talk channel while a serious problem is taking place elsewhere. It is the value of intercom systems in high-noise environments that degrade people’s hearing that is the new discovery of recent times.

This issue can be tackled by a set-up in which a bone-conduction Bluetooth headset is linked to an intercom system. In this scenario, a worker can hear clearly and speak into their microphone while their hearing is protected by professional-grade earplugs.

“That has turned into a very attractive workflow, because not only does it protect their hearing to a government-approved standard, it also allows them to put a hard hat on,” says Boster. This is because of the form factor of the headsets and the position of their bone conduction points. “These are commonly available headsets. It’s not like we invented them,” Boster adds.

The technology that Clear-Com has developed comes in via the intercom system elements of the solution, including the beltpack on the worker’s waist, providing full duplex communication and controls that the worker can touch on their hip. They can even tell the difference between these buttons at hip level with a glove on. And it all comes in a rugged package, that can be thrown and dropped, and still be picked up and used.

“All of that workflow is attached to something that allows them no cord from the head to the hip. So there is nothing to get caught in machinery or have any kind of interruption,” Boster says of the headset/intercom combination.

Generally speaking, in industrial markets where life or hearing safety is a concern, intercom systems can be implemented without the level of complexity you would see in a broadcast setting where you might find a 1028 x 1028 crosspoint matrix intercom system being used to run a set of TV studios.

“You’re talking about groups that are much smaller, like six to 24 people in a system using either one or two channels,” Boster says. These more straightforward systems don’t have anything like the same level of density or possible number of combinations of how people can work together that you might see elsewhere.

“You want to deliver a solution to somebody and it’s not their job to run an intercom system,” Boster says. “It’s their job to lay a cable or scrape a ship or whatever it may be. So you need something that’s going to be very straightforward, and we have systems that are at that level of simplicity in our portfolio.”

And yet while industrial customers with life safety and hearing safety requirements don’t really need the latest and greatest advances in intercom technology where you have IP protocols enabling interaction with third-party systems in broadcasting, there can be some crossover with more recent advances.

Often a new full duplex intercom system needs to be integrated with existing two-way radios. “In some cases, we’re augmenting, not completely replacing two-way radios,” Boster says. There can also be a need to talk to digital phone hybrids and SIP-based phone systems.

Here, Clear-Com’s LQ family of interface boxes allows users to connect intercoms to other devices. “LQ represents a very capable and simple-to-use interface solution for doing that kind of work. LQ isn’t new, exactly, but it still remains on the newer end of our portfolio of technologies, especially with the developments that we’ve had in terms of SIP,” Boster says.

You probably won’t find Boster scraping the barnacles off the hull of a ship and then repainting it, even with a bone-conduction Bluetooth headset and intercom system attached. “That’s my idea of hell. That would send me over the edge,” he says.

But he certainly has the technology you need to help protect staff hearing and safety when they’re doing important work in that type of environment.