Image credit – Dwight Burdette/Wikipedia
Hand dryers can be typically found in bathrooms and have been designed to help dry our hands after we go to the bathroom. They can be rather loud, but that’s because of all the air rushing out that helps with the drying process. However, it seems that hand dryers might actually be bad for kids.
This is according to 13-year-old Nora Keegan from Calgary, Canada who did some research on hand dryers, and found that these devices can actually harm the ears of young children. Speaking to NPR, Keegan said she was inspired to do some research into the matter after having some bad experiences herself.
“Sometimes after using hand dryers my ears would start ringing. I also noticed that children would not want to use hand dryers, and they’d be covering their ears.” To conduct her study, Keegan visited more than 40 public washrooms over the course of two years, where she used a professional decibel meter to measure the sound of hand dryers.
She found that the most damaging of these hand dryers came from Xlerator and the famous Dyson Airblade, the latter of which emitted sound levels of 121 decibels. As Keegan points out, given that Health Canada prevents the sale of children’s toys that can emit sound that is over 100 decibels, clearly a hand dryer that can emit even louder sounds can’t be good.
To their credit, Dyson has since confirmed that they would be sending an acoustics engineer to meet up with Keegan to discuss her research.
Filed in . Read more about Health and Science. Source: npr.org