Development and realization of an artificial patient with hearing impairment

The paper proposes a narrowband stochastic system model for auditory signal processing. The parameters are ipsilateral, contralateral and interaural hearing losses, false positive and false negative responses, and patient response time. The auditory model is then used to realize a patient simulator (artificial patient), comprising out of two microphones, a skull simulator, sound cards and a noiseless personal computer. A locally stored database contains the simulated and the recorded patient data. First field trials in an audiometric test room at the University Medical Center, Utrecht, The Netherlands, indicate that the artificial patient resembles the behavior of a real patient within a band of 10 dB-HL over the entire audiometric frequency range.