Interfacing the Tympan open-source hearing aid with an external computer for research on decreased sound tolerance

While headphones and hearing protectors are often used to relieve the distress associated with decreased sound tolerance, unnecessary attenuation of surrounding sounds may have negative consequences. With an advanced hearing device that can attenuate according to the wearer’s surroundings or mental state, it may be possible to reduce distress while still mitigating possible negative effects of over-attenuation. To investigate the utility of these features in practice, there is a need for a hearing device with which these features can be implemented. Two existing platforms, the Auditory Research Platform 3.1 and the Tympan Open-Source Hearing Aid Platform RevD, were evaluated for their suitability for decreased sound tolerance research. Due to the high latency of the Auditory Research Platform and the limited computational resources of the Tympan, an open-source software pipeline was built such that some of the processing, for which latency is not as crucial, could run on an external computer.