Speech-enabled pure tone audiometer

Pure tone audiometer (PTA) is a medical instrument used to assess whether a person is suffering from hearing loss, and to what severity. Audiologists rely on the hearing test results obtained using an audiometer in order to prescribe the ideal treatment for the hearing impaired patients. However, these pure tone audiometers used in hospitals are large, bulky and expensive devices, which have to be manually operated by an audiologist. The system proposed here is aimed to embed pre-recorded multi-lingual speech data in a microcontroller-based embedded system so as to achieve an independent, portable and fully automated test system at a lower cost. This paper details the design and implementation carried out to achieve the above goals by implementing a speech enabled pure tone audiometer based on a general purpose 16-bit microcontroller.