An open source platform for hearing research

Abstract

The disparate nature and format of data obtained from existing commercial hearing test systems is a significant impediment to reproducibility of hearing research. Advancement of hearing diagnostic assays requires access to research-grade platforms that are easily customized while enabling broad collaboration across labs with access to varied populations. In this research, we present an open-source platform that combines the Tympan open-source audio processing device with the TabSINT open-source tablet-based hearing software The Tympan uses a Teensy 4.1 processor which leverages the Arduino Development environment, making it accessible to a wide variety of users to create, modify and configure the embedded software. The Tympan is also a powerful audio processing platform that has demonstrated good performance as a hearing aid in a study of 14 adult users with mild to moderate hearing loss. Separately, TabSINT has been used extensively across the Department of Defense for human studies of hearing that include a variety of speech-in-noise tests and questionnaires, with thousands of subjects tested over the past few years. In this project, the two platforms come together, with new hardware extensions, to create a powerful hearing research platform that is extensible and highly accessible, thanks to the low cost of the hardware.