FTL LABS CORP — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: DHA18-007

Description

While clinical audiometry is most often conducted with headphones, there are many practical cases where it is desirable to measure the free-space hearing performance of both normal-hearing listeners and listeners wearing hearing aids, hearing protection devices, or implantable hearing prosthetics, both for evaluating fitness for duty and for evaluating outcomes of clinical interventions. Traditional, two-source sound-field audiometry has very little standardization in terms of where speakers are placed. Consequently, hearing measures conducted with these sound field speakers may not be consistent across different audiological test booths. Conversely, large speaker-arrays cannot easily be deployed into clinical settings, making the development of standardized tests using them impractical. FTL's SonoLoop can be field-calibrated for quantitative results in small spaces. It applies emerging speaker materials, audio chipsets, and room-correction algorithms to ensure repeatability in audiology tests, and provides a standardized method for conducting audiological sound-field testing that is compact, affordable, and reliable enough to allow direct comparisons of data across multiple facilities. SonoLoop uses Digital Signal Processing (DSP), head tracking, and a novel, portable speaker design to accommodate single and multisource sound localization including front-back confusions, separation and perception of multi-talker speech, and spatial hearing from masking for speech perception in noise. Performance of