Développement d'une oreillette pour la mesure des émissions otoacoustiques

Abstract

Despite hearing conservation programs and hearing protectors being worn in the workplace, noise induced hearing loss is still one of the major causes for indemnity to industrial workers in North America. In order to minimize the damages to workers in noisy workplaces, the goal of the following project is to develop a hearing health monitoring system by using otoacoustic emission (OAE) measurements to detect the early onset of hearing loss. Because OAEs are very weak acoustical signals, external noises disturb the detection of these signals drastically. Therefore, detection of OAEs in a noisy industrial workplace is a very challenging task and requires robust signal processing techniques, denoising techniques and high quality instrumentation equipment. To address this challenge, the goals of the project are : to design a new portable device to measure otoacoustic emissions, to design a new OAE probe with reduced electrical and acoustical noises, develop an algorithm to extract the otoacoustic emission and reduce the noise in the signal and finally to validate the developed hearing health monitoring system in realistic conditions. The system will be designed at first as Matlab scripts to test the extraction and denoising algorithms. An OAE measurement probe will be developed in order to validate the Matlab scripts on human subjects through a test campaign. After the human subject test campaign, the OAE measurement system will be integrated as two OAE measurement probes and a central unit to record and process the data. Preliminary results obtained in the laboratory have shown that the envisionned system would be suitable to measure OAEs with a good reliability in conditions where the noise level can reach 75 dB(A). Consequently, the developed system would be able to monitor the worker’s hearing health in an industrial environment and detect at an early stage the onset of auditory fatigue, before the actual hearing loss takes place.

Date	30 Apr 2014
Original language	French
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Jérémie Voix (Supervisor) & Jean-Marc Lina (Co-supervisor)