Towards Enabling DPOAE Estimation on Single-Speaker Earbuds

Irtaza Shahid, Khaldoon Al-Naimi, Ting Dang, Yang Liu, Fahim Kawsar, Alessandro Montanari

Abstract: Distortion Product OtoAcoustic Emissions (DPOAEs) represents faint cochlear responses to dual-frequency stimuli, commonly employed in hearing screening. This paper introduces an innovative approach to trigger DPOAEs using single-speaker earbuds. Due to their compact size, the speakers used in the earbuds exhibit nonlinear behavior, leading to Inter-Modulation Distortions (IMDs) that interfere with DPOAE signals. Conventional medical devices employ dual speakers to mitigate this distortion, such a solution is impractical for space-constrained earbuds. To address this challenge, we propose a method that triggers DPOAEs while circumventing IMDs by designing a stimulus signal that alternates between the two frequencies necessary for triggering DPOAEs. The performance of our system was evaluated through a preliminary user study involving 8 participants, and it demonstrated a median correlation of 0.65 when compared to a medical-grade reference device.