Recording of cortical auditory evoked potentials on Personal Digital Assistants

CAEP have been used in the scientific and medical fields in various practices for decades by researchers, audiologists and doctors. The commercial CAEP recording systems are expensive and lack the software flexibility needed by researchers to investigate new ideas. Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) are handheld computer devices which are typically equipped with powerful processors, memory, input/output ports, memory, touch-screens and wireless connection capability. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that PDAs together with Data Acquisition Cards (DAQ) can be used to present stimulus, acquire potentials, and subsequently process it to visualize CAEPs. It also examines whether this PDA-DAQ system is capable of performing the CAEP recordings on par with commercially available systems, with respect to accuracy and consistency.;The DAQ card interfaces with the PDA via the Compact Flash (CF) slot of the PDA. The software application running on the PDA controls the playback of the stimulus and recording of the evoked potentials data through the DAQ card. The post processing of the data and subsequent display of CAEP is also done on the PDA through a user friendly Graphical user interface (GUI).;Eight normal hearing adults were the subjects for the recording experiments. Two different DAQ cards are used to acquire CAEP for each subject. The CAEP characteristic parameters, P1-N1-P2 are extracted from the resulting CAEPs. The characteristic features are then verified for consistency against a commercial system made by Neuroscan Ltd. The results show that the PDA-DAQ system proves to be an on-par system to the commercial CAEP recording system. The proposed PDA-DAQ system is portable and provides software control and flexibility to researchers.