1 / 6

Evaluating psychoacoustic measures for establishing presence of tinnitus

Evaluating psychoacoustic measures for establishing presence of tinnitus. James A. Henry, PhD; Garnett P. McMillan, PhD; Emily J. Thielman, MS; Gino Galvez, PhD; Tara L. Zaugg, AuD; Edward Porsov, MS; Grayson Silaski, BSEE. Aim

dash
Download Presentation

Evaluating psychoacoustic measures for establishing presence of tinnitus

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Evaluating psychoacoustic measures for establishing presence of tinnitus James A. Henry, PhD; Garnett P. McMillan, PhD; Emily J. Thielman, MS; Gino Galvez, PhD; Tara L. Zaugg, AuD; Edward Porsov, MS; Grayson Silaski, BSEE

  2. Aim • Develop and document defined test for detecting presence/absence of tinnitus with high degree of confidence. • Relevance • Veterans can claim tinnitus as “service-connected” disability. • Currently, determining presence of tinnitus is based on subjective reporting—objective measures do not exist.

  3. Method • Used computer-automated, self-guided tinnitus evaluation system to conduct 3 phases of testing to compare psychoacoustic measures of tinnitus between participants with vs without tinnitus. • Phase 1 measures: loudness match, pitch match, minimum masking level, residual inhibition, Békésy, and forced-choice double staircase. • Phases 2 and 3 measures: chosen based on Phase 1 results.

  4. Method Podiometer (“Pod”) used by participants to respond to automated testing by turning encoder dial and depressing response buttons. Pod connects to computer and is hardwired to insert earphones.

  5. Results • Number of tests and time of testing decreased during each successive phase. • Differences were seen between groups: • Most notably, higher low-frequency loudness matches and higher median pitch matches were observed for participants with tinnitus.

  6. Conclusion • Study did not result in a defined test for detecting presence/absence of tinnitus. • But data did reveal significant differences in responses between groups with vs without tinnitus. • Results suggest that further efforts can produce a defined psychoacoustic test battery for identifying tinnitus.

More Related