Meet the Auren

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.