Abstract

A personal computer (PC)-based audiometer was developed for interactive remote audiometry. This paper describes a tele-audiometric system and evaluates the performance of the device when compared with conventional face-to-face audiometry. The tele-audiometric system is fully PC-based. A sound card featuring a high-quality digital-to-analog converter is used as a pure-tone generator. The audiometric programs were developed based on Microsoft Windows in order to maximize usability. Audiologists and their subjects can use the tele-audiometry system as one would utilize any PC application. A calibration procedure has been applied for the standardization of sound levels in the remote system. The performance of this system was evaluated by comparing PC-based audiometry with the conventional clinical audiometry system for 37 subjects. Also, performance of the PC-based system was evaluated during use at a remote site. The PC-based audiometry system estimated the audiometric threshold with an error of less than 2.3 dBSPL. Only 10.7% of the results exhibited an error greater than 5 dBSPL during use at a remote site. The PC-based tele-audiomerty showed acceptable results for use at a remote site. This PC-based system can be used effectively and easily in many locations that have Internet access but no local audiologists.

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Measurement of driver's state is important in both daily healthcare and prevention of car accidents. Existing measurement methods, however, are too complex and uncomfortable to measure for everyday. A nonintrusive biosignal monitoring system is demanded for increasing the accessibility. In this paper, we proposed a nonintrusive measurement system integrated in a vehicle for recording electrocardiographic (ECG) signals and tested the performance of the system. The system consists of dry electrodes attached to the steering wheel and a wireless communication module using a Bluetooth device. ECG signals measured by our system were compared with those by a conventional system employing wet electrodes during real city road driving. Various parameters used for HRV analysis in time and frequency domain showed no significant differences between the two simultaneously measured ECG signals. The result implies the possibility that developed system could have a potential to monitor health information in a vehicle instead of commercial equipments.