The researchers found that three of the 65 sounds emitted by these 14 sound machines, when turned all the way up and placed within a foot of infants’ ears, would bombard infants with a noise level exceeding 85 A-weighted decibels, a safety limit set by the U.S. So did the study raise any cause for concern? Yes. Overall, they found that, at maximum volume, every one of the noise machines placed within 3 1/4 feet of infants’ ears were capable of producing sounds that exposed the babies to more than 50 A-weighted decibels, what the study describes as “the current recommended noise limit for infants in hospital nurseries.” They made mathematical corrections to account for the fact that an infant’s ear canal responds to sounds differently than an adult’s does.
They recorded how loud the machines would be when placed a little under a foot from an infant’s ears-if, say, you put a sleep machine inside your child’s crib or mounted it on the crib rail-as well as how loud the machines would be when they were placed 3 1/4 feet or 6 1/2 feet from infants’ ears-so, on the nightstand. Papsin and his colleagues at the University of Toronto and the Hospital for Sick Children tested the loudness of 65 white-noise sounds emitted by 14 infant sleep machines when these machines were set to maximum volume. Moreover, many of the articles covering the study emphasized that every single one of the sound machines exceeded a “recommended noise limit,” yet this limit has nothing to do with infant safety or hearing loss at all.įirst, let me briefly describe the study. In fact, “not a single infant was harmed in the study,” explains lead author Blake Papsin, a pediatric otolaryngologist at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children-because no babies were involved in the study. And although the study raised questions about how white-noise machines should be used, it didn’t show that the machines caused hearing loss or deafness. These stories were all based on the results of a single study published in Pediatrics.
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