Our interests at Essex have shifted towards the modelling of hearing impairment in our ‘Hearing Dummy’ project. As part of this project we have developed software (MultiThreshold) for testing our patients. This software allows us to measure a range of thresholds, psychophysical tuning curves and compression functions. This software and accompanying documentation can be downloaded from here.
Experimenter console ___ Patient response interface
Hearing profiles
A complete single-ear profile takes less than two hours and result in the following typical example profile.
A full description of the technique can be found in Lecluyse et al (2013).
The technique was developed as part of Wendy Lecluyse’s PhD thesis
Population data
We have measured hearing profiles of a large group of 25 normal hearing young adults and 65 hearing impaired older adults. Their data can be viewed in an internal research report ‘Auditory profiles’.
Hearing dummies
We aim to generate computer programs that simulate individualised models of impairment for each patient that we study. The models are created using the MAP software (see modelling page) and the patients are tested on the MultiThreshold software (see above) so as to better evaluate the models. For this reason, the assessment software and the modelling software have been integrated into a combined package.
However, the two types of software can be used completely independently.