Can Bone Conduction Headphones Protect Your Hearing?

For more than 100 years, various modern products that can emit sound have appeared around us, and various earphones have also begun to be worn on our ears. They all have one thing in common – they have speakers that can produce sound independently. The existence of these things makes the sound of the world richer and more wonderful than ever before, but at the same time it has too many negative effects that cannot be ignored, one of which is hearing loss.

According to the World Health Organization, today, nearly 50% of people aged 12-35 worldwide are at risk of hearing loss. It is estimated that by 2050, about 1 in 4 people in the world will suffer from hearing problems. However, in recent years, a new type of earphone has appeared in people’s field of vision – it does not make any sound by itself, you only need to hang it on the pinna and put the earphone close to the ear cartilage to listen to music and make calls.

So, can this new type of earphone protect our hearing?

The principle of bone conduction headphones

The first use of bone conduction headphones dates back to the 18th century. It is rumored that Beethoven, who was deaf, put one end of a long rod on the edge of the piano (some say it was inserted in the piano, but the record is not clear), and the other end was contained in his mouth as close to the cochlea as possible, and the long rod transmitted the sound to the jawbone , and the cochlea of the inner ear. With this, Beethoven once again created an immortal movement. Therefore, bone conduction earphones directly bypass the ear canal and eardrum, play the role of the eardrum, and let the sound reach the cochlea of the middle ear and inner ear through the same frequency vibration of the skull. We can understand that bone conduction earphones omit the first half of the journey and take a shortcut. In fact, most of us have been exposed to bone conduction at some point. Put your ears close to the ground, and you can hear the footsteps of “tap, tap, tap” through vibration; cover your ears, and you can still hear yourself mumbling, which is a natural phenomenon of bone conduction.

Can Bone Conduction Headphones Protect Your Hearing?

To know whether bone conduction headphones can protect hearing, we need to know how traditional stereos, headphones and even other sound sources can damage our hearing. For a healthy ordinary person, the first thing to pay attention to is the eardrum in terms of the site of hearing impairment. People understand sound waves as drumsticks and eardrums as drumheads, and think that vigorous hammering may smash the drumheads, making you unable to hear the sound. But in fact, the eardrum is not as fragile as we imagined. The sounds we often hear in life will not cause direct damage to the eardrum, but if you may like to slap yourself, or must fall, or blow your nose vigorously, the eardrum will be damaged.

Another way damage to the eardrum comes from inflammation. In this regard, the bad use of traditional earphones, especially in-ear earphones, is more likely to bring related risks. For example, closed damp ear canals and unclean earphones lead to the spread of bacteria, causing inflammation, pus, and scabs, which in turn affect the health of the eardrum. Damage to the eardrum will of course directly lead to hearing impairment, which is called conductive hearing impairment.

The bone conduction earphones that take a shortcut not only bypass the eardrum, but also do not plug into the ear canal like traditional earphones, causing other problems. From this point of view, it does protect the ears and hearing to a certain extent.

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