Development of hearing self-assessment pure tone audiometer

Hearing impaired persons suffer from irreversible damage. Hearing screening test is used to detect hearing-impairment degree in different frequencies for both right and left ears. The conventional audiometer requires an audiologist to perform hearing test process, which causes a burden for the hearing-impaired person in respect of time and cost. The aim of this study is to develop a new portable audiometer for the hearing self-assessment. This portable audiometer consists of a computer, Raspberry pi 3 B+, patient response button and headphone. The sound signal is send to patient via headphones and the patient feeds back the response to the system using the left mouse button. Based on the response of the patient an automatic audiogram is plotted between frequency and intensity, which presents the volume of sound pressure. The results include the audiogram and raw data are saved in CSV files named with the time and date. A familiarization procedure is used to make the hearing-impaired person understands and able to perform the response task. The less time consuming and efficient Hughson Westlake procedure is implemented in the popular Python programming language to obtain the audiogram. The use of the open source Python programming language, help to reduce software development cost.