Phoneme-Based Self Hearing Assessment on a Smartphone

Author

Jong Min Choi ; Junil Sohn ; Yunseo Ku ; Dongwook Kim ; Junghak Lee

Author_Institution

Future IT Res. Center, Samsung Adv. Inst. of Technol., Yongin, South Korea

Volume

17

Issue

3

fYear

2013

fDate

May-13

Firstpage

526

Lastpage

529

Abstract

Phonemes provide an interesting alternative to pure tones in hearing tests. We propose a new smartphone-based method for self-hearing assessment using the four Korean phonemes which are similar to the English phonemes /a/, /i/, /sh/, and /s/. We conducted tests on 15 subjects diagnosed with mild to severe hearing loss and estimated their conventional pure-tone hearing thresholds from their phoneme hearing thresholds using regression analysis. The phoneme-based self-hearing assessment was found to be sufficiently reliable in estimating the hearing thresholds of hearing-impaired subjects. The difference between the hearing thresholds obtained through conventional pure-tone audiometry and those obtained using our method was 5.6 dB HL on average. The proposed hearing assessment was able to significantly reduce the mean test time compared to conventional pure-tone audiometry.

Keywords

hearing; patient diagnosis; regression analysis; smart phones; English phoneme; Korean phoneme; conventional pure-tone audiometry; conventional pure-tone hearing threshold; hearing test; hearing threshold estimation; hearing-impaired subject; mean test time reduction; mild hearing loss; phoneme hearing threshold; phoneme-based self hearing assessment; pure tone; regression analysis; self-hearing assessment; severe hearing loss; smartphone-based method; Auditory system; Ear; Google; Internet; Smart phones; Speech; Phoneme; self hearing assessment; smartphone;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Biomedical and Health Informatics, IEEE Journal of

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

2168-2194

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/JBHI.2013.2238549

Filename

6407607