Modern industrial environments such as aviation, manufacturing, and logistics are demanding workspaces that require heavy machinery and clear lines of communication across multiple locations. Historically, the necessity of heavy-duty Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) often resulted in worker isolation, which can create safety risks in networked operations. Specifically in aviation, the trade-off between protecting a worker’s hearing and enabling clear, real-time communication is non-negotiable not only for the safety of the worker but also the meticulous timing involved in modern air travel. This reality is driving the convergence of hi-fidelity audio performance and industrial safety standards.
For AV and IT managers overseeing communications, safety systems, and networked audio, high-performance hearing protection officially becomes a high-value, active endpoint on the network. With a vision centered on the employee experience in demanding situations, making sure workers that spend hours in isolation get the protection they need as well as reliable communication, and sometimes a bit of enjoyment.
At HARMAN Embedded Audio, we have spent years working at the intersection of professional audio, connectivity, and regulated environments. What we see clearly is that high-performance hearing protection is no longer just safety equipment. For AV and IT managers overseeing communications, safety systems, and networked audio, it is becoming an active, intelligent endpoint within a broader communications ecosystem. Our work in smart PPE reflects a fundamental shift from compliance-driven design to human-centered engineering that prioritizes protection, communication, and worker experience simultaneously. This human-centered approach, moving beyond mere compliance to enhance productivity and well-being, is the foundation for the next generation of smart safety technology.
The Design Challenge: Merging Protection With Acoustic Performance
Designing high-fidelity, high-clarity audio into safety-certified PPE is something of an engineering hurdle, requiring the convergence of two distinct industries. Consumer audio engineers typically aim for ideal acoustic environments, while PPE engineers adhere to strict, non-negotiable standards focused on protecting against hazardous noise levels that can degrade hearing over time. This creates real challenges when integrating features like comfort and sound quality into the safety-certified environment.
In our work embedding proprietary hardware and software platforms into safety-certified hearing protection products such as Båstadgruppen’s Guardio, we address challenges that extend well beyond conventional audio design. Every engineering decision must preserve mandated safety requirements while still enabling reliable communication and intelligible sound.
When working with mission-critical audio in PPE, there are several non-negotiable design hurdles. The solution cannot compromise structural integrity, acoustic sealing, or flammability compliance of the protective shell, as preserving both passive attenuation and active noise cancellation is essential. Materials approved for industrial safety products are often acoustically restrictive, difficult to mold, and governed by strict regulatory standards, forcing us to adapt enclosure geometry, transducer placement, and venting strategies well beyond traditional consumer-audio design approaches. These designs need to function for all-day wear, meaning engineers have to solve for comfort in demanding conditions. A major challenge is balancing the need for a strong clamping force, which must be sufficient to prevent leakage of both ingress and egress noise, with the absolute requirement that the pressure would not be too great on the head over extended shifts.
Unlike consumer headphones, the headsets must fit in various environments and work with the different permutations of head and torso shape, specifically accommodating being mounted to hard hats and helmets, and other equipment around the neck and shoulder. This complexity requires extensive investigation and several mechanical, electrical, and acoustical iterations.
Engineering Tailored Sound
To overcome the acoustic deficiencies inherent in working with safety-compliant enclosures involves highly specialized tuning and software control that makes performance possible despite physical constraints. Since PPE isn’t an ideal acoustic chamber, we use custom engineering to address the challenge within the limited space of the ear cup, which included looking at odd geometries and different shapes of the transducer enclosures to maximize performance. Drawing on our embedded audio platforms developed for industrial and wearable applications, we tailor both hardware and DSP architectures specifically for safety-certified enclosures where ideal acoustic conditions do not exist.
DSP algorithms are critical for enabling clarity in chaotic, noisy conditions by managing sound dynamically. This includes utilizing ANC and wind noise reduction IP to account for open-air environments. For instance, if an operator is out in open space and there could be a sudden gust of wind that saturates the microphones, the system must instantly cancel that out to preserve communication clarity.
Tuning the voice path and the signal path is vital for the outbound speech quality, ensuring the PPE microphone processing strips out engine noise, wind, and industrial static so the worker’s voice can reach command clearly. This deployment of advanced audio processing ensures the protective equipment enhances, rather than hinders, the ability of the worker to communicate and safely perform their duties.
Communication and IT Alignment: Smart PPE as a Networked Audio Device
For the AV/IT manager, smart PPE can be viewed as a mission-critical networked audio device, a classification that changes how IT systems are managed and how the integrity of the signal is protected. This enables communication on two fronts: internal team communication (multi-point to multi-point) and external command/coordinator communication.
Systems must seamlessly manage the user experience by coordinating between different modes of usage, such as lowering music volume during voice communication. Coordinating these scenarios, which prioritize mission-critical communication over personal content consumption, requires extensive storyboarding and sophisticated software logic to handle multiple modalities. Integrating advanced communications capabilities allows IT teams to treat PPE as a fully connected element of the broader wireless infrastructure strategy, including over-the-air firmware updates and robust power management to meet demanding industrial shift requirements.
The Future: Context-Aware Audio, AI, and the Next Frontier of Safety Tech
The current generation of smart PPE is a functional platform; the next wave will focus on embedded intelligence. Context-aware audio is the future, offering devices that adjust themselves based on real environments. The future is moving rapidly toward the application of machine learning, revolving around devices that dynamically adjust their features based on the environment they detect. This means that if the device detects that the operator is nearing a large engine block or an airplane is approaching, it would instantly and automatically adjust the noise cancellation profile to the required level of protection.
The application of machine learning and AI, specifically keyword spotting, enables speech recognition within the headset itself, even in high-noise environments. This could allow the system to be trained to pick up key trigger words, such as emergency phrases from a nearby worker, demonstrating a move toward an AI-enhanced safety co-pilot. This vision extends beyond industrial safety, showing the convergence with healthcare (hearing aids/enhancement), smart glasses, and other next-gen wearables — all requiring high-performance, embedded, low-power audio solutions.
The Convergence of Safety, Communication, and Sound
Global awareness of occupational hearing loss is rising, creating growing demand for protective equipment that enables communication rather than inhibiting it. Through close collaboration with partners such as Båstadgruppen, and by integrating embedded audio early in the product design process, we help transform certified PPE into intelligent, connected tools. For manufacturers entering this space, embedded audio is not an add-on but a strategic capability that benefits from shared expertise, early engagement, and a commitment to solving real-world challenges together.
David Jeon
David Jeon has more than 20 years of engineering and product development experience in various startups and internationally recognized companies. He is most notable for leading Beats by Dre as the first engineer, successfully scaling the business and integrating with Apple through acquisition. Before taking on the role of Senior Director, Engineering at HEA, he led the HARMAN Multimedia platforms development and set up its first software engineering team in Shenzhen.
