Audiologic evaluation of the tympan open source hearing aid
Joshua M. Alexander, Odile Clavier, William E. Audette · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2018
The “Tympan” open source hearing aid (Creare LCC) was developed in response to needs identified by the 2014 Open Speech Signal Processing Platform Workshop hosted by NIH. The Tympan Phase I prototype is a neck-worn device with external microphones and headphones implemented on a Teensy 3.6 development board and Arduino software platform. Custom-designed electronics for audio input acquisition, digital signal processing, power management, and wireless communication allows expert users to create new algorithms directly in firmware. Operating in parallel, a custom software interface allows “occasional” users with the necessary support to modify easily parameters of existing algorithms. A variety of electroacoustic analyses, including throughput delay, amplitude compression input/output curves and time constants, harmonic distortion, internal noise, frequency response, and other real-ear measurements were performed on the Phase I prototype using commercial hearing aid analyzers and compared to today’s premium hearing aid products. Overall, the results indicate that the Tympan Phase I prototype performs similarly to an actual hearing aid on these metrics. Results from an early Phase II prototype will also be reported. [Work supported by NIH NIDCD Grant #1R44DC015445-01 to Creare LLC.]