Implementation of a gelatin model to simulate biological activity in the inner ear for electrovestibulography (EVestG) validation

In this work, a physical model that simulates electrical activity of the inner ear has been developed. The purpose is to evaluate extraction of vestibular field potentials (FPs) in the presence of various sources of noise by a proprietary software algorithm. The ear model is constructed of gelatin as an alternative to human tissue where independently driven electrical sources are placed in gelatin to mimic various biological signals (muscle, cerebral, and vestibular). Components of system noise (recording apparatus generated noise, electrodes, etc) will be naturally superimposed on the recording, hence enables various recording conditions to be simulated. Muscle activity present in the recordings and noise generated from the recording apparatus were found to be the most dominating sources that degrade performance of FP extraction. The model can be used to provide insights towards enhancing the FP detection algorithm under various signal-to-noise ratios.