Intelligent smartphone audiometry

The continuously aging population in the majority of industrialized nations challenges the healthcare providers to maintain quality of healthcare services at status quo. To make health care sustainable, the paradigm Ambient Intelligence can be used to exploit information and telecommunication technology for the development of autonomous healthcare services. Following this approach, we design and implement a virtual audiologist dubbed ViA, performing air-conduction and bone-conduction hearing tests based on a standard in contrast to existing solutions. The software platform is Android. In this paper, we present the system architecture of ViA with focus on the Android platform and discuss calibration issues. First test results in office environment indicate that a large range of hearing thresholds can be reproduced on different smartphones within a band of 9 dB. ViA has the potential to identify individuals with correctable hearing loss without putting extra load on the healthcare providers.