title: Binaural measurement of bone conduction click evoked otoacoustic emissions in adults and infants.
abstract: Transient evoked otoacoustic emissions (TEOAEs) are usually evoked with air conduction (AC) stimuli. Only a few reports exist about OAEs where stimuli have been delivered using bone conduction (BC) by placing a bone conductor on the forehead or the mastoid. The aims of the present study were to improve the test performance of BC-TEOAEs by using a nonlinear stimulation protocol and to find out, whether this technique can be applied in newborn hearing screening. BC-TEOAEs were measured binaurally in ten normal hearing adults and in ten infants. For measurements in infants, miniaturized probes without loudspeakers were constructed to allow a complete insertion of the probe in the infant's ear canal. It could be shown that robust and valid BC-TEOAEs can be elicited using a nonlinear stimulation protocol. Findings in adults indicated that BC-TEOAEs can be measured with properties similar to AC-TEOAEs. However, mean BC-TEOAE levels were reduced by 0.8-3.7 dB depending on frequency. In view of test time, this is compensated by performing binaural recordings. Measurements in infants indicated that the screening performance of BC-TEOAEs and AC-TEOAEs may be comparable. Further studies have to investigate, whether BC-TEOAEs are more robust than AC-TEOAEs against small conductive hearing loss.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Real-Time Computer Systems, Technische Universität München, Arcisstrasse 21, 80333 Munich, Germany. florian.kandzia@tum.de
authors.forename: Florian
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Kandzia
authors.forename: Johann
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Oswald
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Janssen
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000375:Aging; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D001844:Bone Conduction; D004867:Equipment Design; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory; D005260:Female; D006320:Hearing Tests / Q000295:instrumentation; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D008297:Male; D008904:Miniaturization; D015997:Neonatal Screening / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D017084:Otoacoustic Emissions, Spontaneous; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D011930:Reaction Time; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013997:Time Factors