Task-based measurements for estimating the workers' exposure to acoustic noise

The standard ISO 9612 describes an engineering method for measuring workers' exposure to noise in a work environment and for estimating the mean noise exposure level taking into account levels of uncertainty. In the paper, the authors propose a novel sampling strategy to automatically select the measurement episodes that are representative of a working activity. The bootstrap approach is proposed as a means to compute the measurement uncertainty of the A-weighted equivalent continuous sound pressure level associated with the work related task of interest. The proposal has been verified with real data acquired during a measurement campaign carried out from exposure to the acoustic noise of a milling machine.