On a high-speed hearing measurement considering the age of both ears

Abstract

In order to enrich the human senses, care must be taken not to damage your hearing. Hearing damage suffered in a living environment is difficult to find out because there are few initial symptoms. Existing pure tone hearing test detects whether pure tones are heard well for each frequency for 250–8000 Hz sound, which is mainly used in everyday conversation, but it is inaccurate and takes a long time. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed a high-speed measurement method that can easily and quickly self-measure both ears' hearing damage through an APP of a smart-phone. In this method, nine pure tones that are age-compensated for each voice sub-band are alternately heard in both ears, thereby self-identifying their own hearing damage at high speed. When 18 tone pulses were heard for 27 s per person, 1 out of 12 subjects was identified as suspected of partial hearing damage. When the test subjects were informed of the hearing determination method for the number of hearings, the participants themselves immediately determined whether their hearing was damaged. Eventually, both ears' hearing damage was easily and accurately measured by the method proposed, which took more than 10 min with the existing manual method. As a result, it is possible to maintain a healthy life by simply determining whether or not there is a hearing loss.