Will earplugs affect the utilization of the skeleton earpiece?

There’s no explanation why not. The main parts of the ears are actually, essentially, aloof from the hearing process when  ‘Bonephones’.

A bone conduction earpiece is a portable speaker system made to bypass several responsive portions of your ear so as to reduce the risk of hearing loss. Based on current studies, any noise over a hundred decibels may cause hearing problems like tinnitus and temporary deafness, even resulting in permanent harm. Your standard iPod can achieve noises as extreme as one hundred fifteen decibels within the US, but here inside the United kingdom, special software programs limits most appliances to about 100db.

Anyway, a bone conducting headset (a tech occasionally known as ‘Bonephones’) can be the best method to play your songs safely. Patrick J. Kiger of How Stuff Works.com writes the science behind ‘Bonephones’.

“To understand how bone conduction works, you first have to understand how we hear sounds, which we do in two ways: Sound travels in waves through the air. Normally, sound waves travel through several structures in the ear, before being translated and transmitted through our nervous systems to our brains. First, the waves enter the outer ear, or pinna, which is the big flappy piece of cartilage that helps to focus the sound. From there, the sound goes into the air-filled middle ear, which includes the auditory canal and the eardrum, a flap of skin that vibrates when exposed to the energy from sound waves. On the other side of the eardrum, there are three small bones, the ossicles, which are attached to it. They transmit the vibration to the cochlea, a fluid-filled structure that takes those vibrations and converts them to electrical impulses that are sent along the auditory nerve to the brain. But that’s not the only way our body can process sound. Sound waves can also be transmitted through the bones in your head. When the bones vibrate, the sound reaches the cochlea, just as it would by going through the middle ear and eardrum, and results in the same sort of nerve impulses being transmitted to your brain. This method of sound transmission is called bone conduction”

According to Kiger, the great composer Beethoven utilized a sort of prototypical version of this method. By attaching a rod both to his piano and to his skull, he could ‘hear’ the sound he was making, an revolutionary solution that shares the identical essential principle with bone conduction.

‘Bonephones’ should have no effect whatsoever on whether a user is sporting earplugs or not, since the portion of the ear which is ‘plugged’ is not really in use.

My own private doubts concerned the security to that user of these new headphones, but Kiger affirms this,

“Deborah Price, a doctor of audiology and vice-chair of the Audiology Foundation of America, told Wired in 2004 that bone conduction is “very safe”

Furthermore, ‘Bonephones’ are principally good for our good for the visually impaired user, who may need to play music, audiobooks or additional content without having to cover their ears.

The technology remains to be relatively novel, but in the meanwhile it seems being perfectly safe and generally able to match the fundamental capabilities of a standard pair of earbuds, although doubts remain concerning the level of audio quality accomplished via this method.