On a measurement of noise-induced hearing considering the age of both ears

Abstract

The noise-induced hearing loss suffered in the multimedia living environment is difficult to detect because there are few symptoms in the early stages. Existing pure tone audiometry detects the response to whether pure tones are well heard for each frequency to 250–8000 Hz sound, which is mainly used in everyday conversation, but it is inaccurate and takes a long time to measure noise-induced hearing loss. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new measurement method that can easily and quickly self-measure noise-induced hearing loss in both ears through a smartphone APP. In this method, the age-compensated 9 pure tones for each voice subband are alternately heard in both ears at 10 kHz or higher, thereby rapidly determining one's own hearing loss. When 18 tone pulses were heard for 27 s per person, 68 out of 100 subjects in their 20 s were identified as suspected of partial hearing loss, and 27 including them were identified as having severe noise-induced hearing loss. And when the subjects were instructed on how to discriminate the number of hearings for noise-induced hearing loss, the participants themselves immediately determined whether their hearing was impaired. In the end, the noise-induced hearing loss measurement method in both ears, which took more than 10 minutes with the existing manual method, could be easily and accurately measured with our proposed method.