WHITE RIVER JUNCTION, Vt. -
Big bucks for a White River Junction company that makes earpieces for the military.
Sound Innovations just got a Department of Defense contract for more than $96,000. The company, which started up in 2004, will use the money to make earplugs that both protect hearing and record blast impact data. The information can be used in cases where there is traumatic head injury.
"And they haven't been able to find out, figure out a way to be able to monitor blast exposure and correlate that to brain injury. So, the goal of the project is to incorporate excelometers into earplugs and be able to collect blast data from those earplugs and correlate that to potential brain jury if there is an event," said Chris Pearson of Sound Innovations.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, helped secure the contract. The company plans to get a prototype on the market in about a year.
