Research On Hearing Self-test Method Based On Hearing Aids

Hearing loss is an irreversible disease.There are about 466 million people who are suffering from disabling hearing loss.Wearing hearing aids is the most effective way for hearing loss.The hearing loss is different for everyone and needs to be measured before wearing hearing aids.At present,the conventional hearing test still dominates in most audiology clinics.The patients with hearing loss require to go to the clinics to complete the measurement under the guidance of audiologists.The whole test process is complex and takes a long time.In order to overcome the above problems and make patients test hearing by themselves,this paper proposes the hearing self-test method based on hearing aids and builds a hearing self-test system.The hearing self-test system based on hearing aids proposed in this paper uses hearing aids as the test audio sources,and a smartphone that runs the hearing self-test software as a human-computer interaction interface.A fast hearing-test algorithm called “coarse-to-fine focus” algorithm is developed to control the generation of the stimulate audio signal.The hearing self-test system can guide the patients to complete the hearing test by themselves.In this paper,the hardware design of the hearing aid,the hearing self-test software and the hearing-test algorithm are described in detail.At the same time,the oscilloscope and the professional hearing-aid test box Fonix 8000 are used to test the performance of stimulate audio signal.In order to further assess the actual performance of this system,the subjective test is conducted with 20 subjects with different hearing levels to compare with the conventional haring test.The acoustically test of this system and the subjective test on 20 patients indicate that the hearing self-test has an average error of less than 6 dB HL for all 6 frequencies,and is capable of saving more than 50% hearing test time on average compared to the conventional hearing test.Finally,the results indicate that the patients can test hearing loss by themselves using this system.