A Software Module for the Adaptive Estimation of Steady State Auditory Evoked Potentials

A graphical user interface (GUI) implementing a novel technique of fast estimation of steady state auditory evoked potentials (SSAEPs) for rapid assessment of the functionality of the human auditory nervous system is presented. The proposed signal estimator has shown great promise in the fast extraction of weak signals buried under large amounts of noise such as the case with SSAEP signals. Currently, the main technical impediment in the widespread clinical use of the SSAEP testing for hearing assessment is the excessively long measurement time needed for the estimation process due to the presence of large amounts of background noise. The presented software module that is publicly disseminated through the Internet is meant to facilitate the use of an efficient signal processing technique by the hearing researchers. The software environment allows for loading previously recorded SSAEP signals into the workspace for analysis. Moreover, it enables the user to add simulated SSAEP signals to the background EEG for the purpose of testing the capability of the underlying signal processing algorithm.