E. Harris Nober, 77; Created Alarm System for Hearing Impaired
By JEREMY PEARCE
Published: June 4, 2005
Dr. E. Harris Nober, an audiologist who helped establish national standards for loudness in the alarms of residential smoke detectors and introduced strobe flashes to alert the hearing impaired, died on May 23 at his home in Arlington, Va. He was 77.
The cause was liver cancer, his family said.
Dr. Nober, who was an emeritus professor of communication disorders at the University of Massachusetts, had previously taught at Syracuse and Adelphi Universities.
In the 1980's, Dr. Nober pioneered the use of strobe lights in the homes of the hearing impaired. He developed a system that connected doorbells, telephones and smoke detectors to engage strong visual cues of flashing lights.
In an earlier study conducted for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Dr. Nober examined the ''waking effectiveness of household smoke and fire-alert detection devices,'' and tested the volume of detectors and the time it took for sleeping participants to respond and leave the building. The study's results were used to help determine the noise levels for detectors.
Dr. Jane R. Madell, an audiologist and director of the Hearing and Learning Center of Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, said Dr. Nober succeeded ''in developing a way of manipulating the visual alarm system to indicate, by the frequency of its flashes, what exactly was making the noise, whether it was a baby-minding alarm or a knock at the front door.''
Dr. Madell added: ''No system existed prior to Dr. Nober's work. And before his system, there had been many tragedies.''
In other research, Dr. Nober was interested in the criteria for measuring hearing loss. With Dr. Charlena M. Seymour, a colleague at Massachusetts, Dr. Nober edited a popular 1997 textbook, ''Introduction to Communication Disorders: A Multicultural Approach'' (Butterworth-Heinemann).
Earl Harris Nober was born in Brooklyn. He received his undergraduate and master's degrees from Brooklyn College and earned a doctorate in experimental psychology from Ohio State University.
In the early 1950's, Dr. Nober worked as a speech therapist at Kings County Hospital Medical Center in Brooklyn. In 1957, he was named an assistant professor of speech pathology and audiology at Adelphi on Long Island.
Dr. Nober moved to Syracuse in 1962, and became a professor of audiology there in 1967. Massachusetts named him chairman of its department of communication disorders in 1969, and he remained with the university for the rest of his career. He became a professor emeritus in 1998.
The American Academy of Audiology gave Dr. Nober its Distinguished Career Achievement Award in 1998. He was a fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
Dr. Nober is survived by his wife of 45 years, Dr. Linda W. Nober, an expert in special education. The couple lived in Arlington and Cummaquid, Mass.
He is also survived by a son, Roger, and a daughter, Jenna Nober, both of Chevy Chase, Md.; a sister, Marilyn Teitelbaum of Laguna Niguel, Calif.; and five grandchildren.
Photo: Dr. E. Harris Nober in 1993. (Photo by University of Massachusetts, Amherst)