Audiometric Earphone - Phase 1

描述（由申请人提供）：本项目旨在开发一种用于听力诊断的耳机，该耳机的功能将显著提高常规听力测试的效率并降低成本。最常用的耳机采用超听觉设计，有几个不受欢迎的特点，包括1)“闭塞效应”，人为增加对骨传导刺激的敏感性；2)环境噪声排除能力差；3)经颅声音传导过多；4)传递到人耳的声压在主体间的高度变异性；5)舒适度差。在骨传导测试时，遮挡效应要求测试耳被揭开。这就要求测试人员在纯音测试期间多次改变换能器的布置。在手动测试中，这个需求会增加几分钟的测试时间。对于自动化测试，在测试过程中需要多次重新定位换能器是不可接受的，因为这不利于降低人员成本的目标。差的环境噪声排除要求在昂贵的音响室进行测试。过度的经颅声音传导导致非测试耳的反应产生误差，这种误差不能总是通过掩蔽噪声来消除。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project seeks to develop an earphone for diagnostic audiometry with features that will significantly increase the efficiency and decrease the cost of routine hearing testing. The most-often used earphones emply a supra-aural design that has several undesirable characteristics, including 1) an "occlusion effect", an artificial increase in sensitivity to bone-conducted stimuli; 2) poor ambient noise exclusion; 3) excessive transcranial conduction of sound; 4) high inter-subject variability in sound pressures delivered to human ears; and 5) poor comfort. The occlusion effect necessitates that the test ear be uncovered during bone conduction testing. This requires that the tester change the transducer arrangement several times during pure tone testing. In manual testing, this requirement can add several minutes to the test time. For automated testing, the need to reposition transducers several times during the test is unacceptable because it is counterproductive to the goal of reducing personnel costs., The poor ambient noise exclusion requires that testing be performed in expensive sound rooms. The excessive transcranial conduction of sound results in errors associated with responses by the non-test ear that cannot always be eliminated by masking noise. The inter-subject variability results increases the variance associated with threshold measures. The poor comfort limits the time that some patients will participate in the test. Other earphones are available that address some, but not all, of these problems. In this project, an earphone will be developed that 1) minimizes the occlusion effect permitting the entire pure tone hearing test to be conducted with a single transducer arrangement and facilitating automated test methods; 2) increases ambient noise exclusion, eliminating (in many environments) the need for sound-attenuating rooms; 3) decreases transcranial conduction of sound resulting in fewer errors associated with responses of the non-test ear; 4) decreases inter-subject variability; and 5) increases comfort. In addition to meeting these goals, the earphone must have a frequency response that is similar to other audiometric earphones to avoid significant changes in the frequency content of stimuli used for speech tests.