Developing a Noise Awareness Rising Web Application within the “Protect your Ears” Project

Abstract

Noise from our environment is causing evergreater problems such as hearing loss among the young. In many cases, children may be exposed to harmful noise even in the most common places such as schools and events. For this reason, we developed a web application in the frame the “Protect your Ears” project that aims the teaching of noise awareness. Playing with this web application helps children to be more aware in protecting their hearing. The web application was subjected to a cohort study where a test and control group was separated at an elementary school. The test group was able to use the web application for two weeks during the teaching sessions, while the control group could not. For objective measurement, the pedagogue used questionnaires before and after the examination. Statistical analyses were performed on the values obtained from the questionnaires. At the beginning of the study, we showed that the control and test groups were not heterogeneous at 5% significance level using the Mann Whitney U test. As a result, there was a significant difference between the preand post-condition for the test group using the Wilcoxon test at the 5% significance level compering to a control group. From this results, we can conclude that playing with the web application the children in the test group became more aware of the noise in their surrounding and mastered preventive behavior.