In 1995, a team of young engineers at Cirrus Research set to work on revolutionising the design and functionality of noise dosimeters. Their hard work and tireless dedication to the protection of people’s hearing led them to design the doseBadge, which has now become synonymous with personal noise exposure measurement. The process of designing the doseBadge wasn’t easy or without challenge, as the Cirrus engineers had to develop something that recorded all the necessary data, whilst ensuring that the person wearing the equipment wasn’t disturbed, and that the equipment itself complied with the Noise At Work regulations, in addition to being low cost, reliable, lightweight, tamper-proof and compliant with the acoustic standard. Some may have thought “why bother?”, but there was a recognition within the Cirrus team that dosimeters, at the time were very unreliable, cumbersome, liable to tampering and potentially dangerous, as the microphone cable could easily have been caught in heavy industrial machinery, causing serious injuries to those wearing them.
