When using a device like the Tympan for hearing science, it is important to know the maximum loudness that can be produced by your system. If you cannot get loud enough, it can limit the range of hearing loss that you can work with. It is important to know how loud you can get. So, we measured the maximum sound pressure level that can be produced by the Tympan when used with a standard HDA 200 headset from Sennheiser. Go to openaudio.blogspot.com to see what it can do!

Measuring how our ears are changing or are being damaged is tricky! While audiometry is a great tool for tracking changes to hearing, you need a cooperative patient and it does not capture everything. Instead, researchers are developing newer probes and test procedure to improve diagnoses. These new procedures try to get a better sense of what part of the ear is causing problems.

The new probes make an airtight seal with your ear canal, and you don't have to do anything but relax, and listen to the soothing sounds of... clicks... and... chirps... and... ok, maybe not relaxing but you might pretend they sounds like birds. This is where the problems start for the hardware engineers. They have to deal with problems like standing waves and noise (electrical, mechanical, and even biological). Standing waves mean that you might not be exciting the tympanic membrane with the energy you intend to, and noise issues mean you might not be able to pick up the low amplitude sounds needed for an accurate diagnosis. Developing a commercial probe that can do all these things is expensive! That means that researchers can typically afford only a handful of units which means smaller studies. And often the data and processing is a black box. That makes it hard for researchers to develop new, better tests. If only there was an open-source platform that can make high quality audio recordings and is completely open. Oh right the Tympan! Now all we need is the probe part, and that's where the Auren comes in. Let's dive a little deeper to understand what the Auren is all about.

See tympan.org for more details on the Auren.

Odile Clavier is a research engineer at Creare LLC. Her general areas of interest include dynamics, controls, and precision engineering with an emphasis on biomedical applications. She has a lot of experience with hearing assessment technology as well as mobile health applications. For this open-source hearing research platform, Odile is the lead investigator: she keeps the team moving forward toward a platform that successfully meets the needs of the hearing research community.

Vero Archambault-Léger is a research engineer at Creare LLC. Vero’s interests lie primarily in developing software to solve important and interesting problems. Recently, her work focused on mobile health and biomedical engineering. She is a full-stack software developer and has experience with many languages including JavaScript, Python, and Flutter. She leads the development and maintenance of TabSINT.

Chris Brooks is a research engineer at Creare LLC. He likes to apply his expertise in robotic control and instrumentation to new technologies. He leads the firmware development on the Tympan to implement all the hearing tests we are currently targeting.

Matt Ueckermann is a research engineer at Creare LLC. Matt develops mathematical models of physical systems; devises novel and optimized algorithms for analysis and data processing; and develops scientific software for geospatial, hearing/acoustics, 3-D reconstruction, and robotics applications. He leads the development of the Auren for this platform.

Brian Graybill is a research engineer at Creare LLC. He applies his mechanical design skills to develop devices appropriate for human use and optimized for acoustics. He manages the day-to-day activities as we develop the platform.

Michael Heinz is a professor of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences & Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University and he leads the Audiology Research Diagnostics Core (ARDC) laboratory there. Mike’s research focuses on understanding and quantifying relations between physiological and perceptual effects of sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL). His expertise supports the overall development of the platform and its validation for use in human and animal studies of hearing.

Hari Bharadwaj is assistant professor in the department of communication sciences and disorders at the University of Pittsburg and collaborates closely with Mike Heinz at Purdue on his research. His research combines human electrophysiological and acoustical measures along with behavioral experiments and computational modeling, to understand the physiological mechanisms underlying our ability to listen in complex everyday environments with multiple sound sources. His expertise will inform the development of the Auren and of the many features of our platform.

Joshua Alexander is associate professor of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at Purdue University and his research involves the interplay of three key components: basic research (understanding normal and impaired auditory perception), translational research (digital signal processing techniques for hearing aids and automatic speech recognition), and modeling (information-theoretic and neural models of perception).  Josh was a key contributor to the development of the original Tympan for hearing aid research and he will help the team continue to expand the platform.

Ananth Grama is professor of Computer Science, and he builds on his extensive experience building large complex systems such as the largest metagenomics portals (MG-RAST) which hosts over 10PB of data and serves over 50,000 users each year. He leads the development of the open science repository for our hearing research platform.

Open Hearing is a website dedicated to supporting the development of an open-source platform for hearing research. We are committed to open source and believe that in doing so we can accelerate research studies and facilitate translation of novel algorithms into widespread use. Our goal is to lower barriers for hardware and software refinement and facilitate translation of these advances into patient care.  

Our core group of developers is comprised of peers at Creare and researchers at Purdue University and at the University of Pittsburg. The development of this platform is supported by a grant from the National Institute of Health in partnership with the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (R44DC021123). Tympan has been in development since 2016, TabSINT since 2014. The Auren is the newest addition to this suite of open-source tools we are now bringing together to expand the reach and user base, so we can build a community of researchers able to collaborate freely using low-cost, high-performance hardware and software.

The possibilities are endless! Tympan offers powerful audio hardware that can acquire and process audio in real-time within the user-friendly, Arduino programming environment. You can also control the Tympan over Bluetooth using our mobile app, which can be configured to your custom application with only a few lines of Arduino code.

See tympan.org for more details on the Tympan.