# CADS — Canadian Audiometric Data Standard

Public draft overview · 2026-11-01
Created and maintained by Audiometrics Canada.

## Purpose
CADS is Aud-Can's open data specification for structuring, exchanging, and connecting occupational hearing records across employers, testing providers, and provinces. Field and Office are the commercial implementation in development. Other organizations may implement the specification.

This document is an explanatory overview, not the complete normative schema, a certification, or a claim of completed conformance. Detailed field definitions and implementation requirements are being reconciled before a launch version is frozen.

## Record families
- Provider: the testing organization.
- Technician: the qualified person performing the test.
- Equipment: the audiometer and calibration context.
- Worker: a persistent identity independent of employment or provider.
- Questionnaire: exposure, hearing-protection, and health-history responses.
- Test: thresholds, comparison references, outcome, and provenance.

## Core design direction
- Consistent records and versioned exchange formats.
- Worker-authorized lookup and scoped history access.
- Employment and performing-provider context retained with tests.
- Offline creation, persistent saving, resumable synchronization, and duplicate prevention.
- Versioned provincial profiles and traceable historical calculations.
- Corrections and confirmation retests linked to original records.

Worker-identity and authorization refinements are design decisions being incorporated into the draft. They should not be read as an assertion that all draft documents and software already implement them.

## Existing standards
CADS is intended to complement CSA Z107.6 (workplace audiometric testing), CSA Z1007 (hearing loss prevention program management), and ASA/ANSI S3.6 (audiometers), alongside applicable provincial requirements. It does not replace these standards. Relevant recordkeeping/reporting clauses must be mapped and actual alignment verified.

CADS is not a designated National Standard of Canada. Government endorsement, CSA/ANSI approval, nationwide adoption, and completed product conformance are not being claimed.

## Status and next steps
The current work is to reconcile the data model, publish a versioned field/schema reference, verify the Alberta profile, and establish validation fixtures and a change process. This overview will be updated as those steps are completed.