That's a very good question, Mr. Chair. I'll try to break that down, absolutely.
You mentioned what happened before the pandemic. I also said in my opening remarks that, for the past 10 years, we've been measuring that. I played Canadian football, if you remember, and people are a lot more aware now of concussion issues. It's a similar effect when you get a big loud bang in your ear. That can create.... I think the data and the science are getting better to...understand what happens. Similarly to concussions, when I played nobody cared about that, but now I think there are a lot of protocols in place. The reason there was no data in the past may be that they were put in the spotlight, given the conditions of the pandemic.
In terms of the breakdown—I really like the question, Mr. Chair, because we call them “sound incidents”—the sound is like the supply chain, but it's a sound chain. It could be many things. If it's a remote participant, like we have today, something can happen in their building, they can lose connectivity and we can lose sound there. For us that might be a sound incident that might not cause an injury or affect the hearing of the interpreter. That being said, they might not be able to interpret if they're not getting the sound, so for us it's a service interruption. We track those.
After that there's.... I don't know, but some of you might have been in meetings a couple of weeks ago when there was an alert on our phones, which was testing the alert system around Canada. There were a lot of meetings, believe it or not, around Canada. Everybody had their phone and, all of a sudden, that big buzz came out. For interpreters who were actually actively listening, it could have created some discomfort, and we have measures for that.
As we mentioned, we went from 128 cases in 2022 to 78 last year, and now we have 10. The downside of that is that the ones we have left are driven mostly by human behaviour. It is the fact that you bring the earpiece towards the microphone, and that's what causes what they call the “Larsen effect”. The Larsen effect is basically a fancy name for feedback, the buzz. That sound can be extremely harmful for your hearing. That's why, even though we only have a few now, those are the ones we would really like to prevent by working with our colleagues. We have that type.
It could be, also, that when the sound is super low, they will work but they can't hear, so it will probably have an effect on them. That's not as immediate as the Larson effect, but we're tracking those as well. They're in the family of sound-related incidents.