Presented herein are integrated techniques to address the perception of distracting sounds by a recipient's residual hearing during testing of a hearing prosthesis. More specifically, in accordance with embodiments presented herein, a first hearing prosthesis located at a first ear of a recipient is configured to selectively operate in a testing-assistance mode in order to support or supplement the testing of testing of the first hearing prosthesis or a second hearing prosthesis located at a second ear of the recipient.

An illustrative system includes a sound processor configured to be worn by a patient and to direct a cochlear implant implanted within the patient to apply electrical stimulation to the patient; and a conductive contact configured to detect a signal representative of an evoked response generated by a brain of the patient, the conductive contact integrated with the sound processor so as to be located between the sound processor and an external surface of a head of the patient while the sound processor is worn by the patient.

A method of evaluating the effectiveness of an auditory prosthesis comprises transmitting a stimulus via an auditory prosthesis, thereby delivering an auditory stimulus to the auditory nervous system of a person fitted with said auditory prosthesis, picking up the neurophysiological signals transmitted by said auditory nervous system in response to the auditory stimulus by means of an electro- or magneto-encephalography system, and processing the received signals. The method also includes transmitting a stimulus made up of at least one pair of linguistic units selected from a phonetic confusion matrix, picking up a neurophysiological signal in response separately for each linguistic unit, and comparing the signals in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the prosthesis.

An expert diagnosis system integrated in a hearing prosthesis system is configured to diagnosis, grade, and remediate inner ear crises. In particular, the expert diagnosis system analyzes combinations of in-situ measured inner ear potentials, obtained in response to electrical and/or acoustic stimulation, in order to identify crisis signatures and to correlate those crisis signatures to clinical symptoms of a specific type and cause of an inner ear crises (i.e., automatically diagnosis the inner ear crisis). The expert system is further configured to grade the severity of the identified clinical symptoms and initiate some form of remedial action to address the identified inner ear crisis.

Occlusion devices, earpiece devices and methods of occluding an ear canal are provided. An occlusion device includes an insertion element, a foldable element and an expandable element. The foldable element is disposed on the insertion element and is configured to receive a medium via the insertion element. The expandable element is disposed over the foldable element. The foldable element is configured to unfold, responsive to the medium, and cause the expandable element to expand to contact the ear canal.

A method, including obtaining data relating to electric hearing, obtaining data relating to acoustic hearing and preparing a prescription for a multimodal hearing prosthesis for an individual based on the obtained data relating to the electric hearing and the acoustic hearing. In an exemplary embodiment, the method entails comparing the data relating to electric hearing to the data relating to acoustic hearing and preparing the prescription based on the results of the comparison.

A physiological information measurement apparatus includes a measuring section that acquires a physiological signal from a living body of a subject, a signal processor that produces a plurality of physiological signal waveforms based on the physiological signal acquired from the measuring section, and that identifies an arithmetic average waveform that is obtained by arithmetic averaging of the plurality of physiological signal waveforms, and information relating to arithmetic average dispersion, and a display that displays at least the information relating to the arithmetic average dispersion.

Systems, apparatus, and methods for collecting, interpreting, and utilizing noise exposure data may include sensors to obtain an analog signal representative of impulse noise sound pressure and an analog signal representative of continuous noise sound pressure. At least one ADC may generate digital signals by sampling the analog signals at rates equal to or greater than twice the reciprocal of a minimum impulse noise rise time. Accelerometers may obtain data in close proximity to and remote from the sensors. At least one processor may include a first combining node to combine the digital signals to represent both the continuous noise and the impulse noise, a shock-artifact detection filter to identify a time frame including a shock artifact based on the accelerometry data, a frequency filter to generate a background-removed audio signal, an adaptive filter to estimate the shock artifact, and a second combining node to produce a shock-artifact-free audio signal.

Presented herein are substantially automated techniques that enable an electro-acoustic or other hearing prosthesis implanted in a recipient to use objective measurements to determine when the recipient is likely experiencing sound perception changes. Once one or more perception changes are detected, the hearing prosthesis may initiate one or more remedial actions to, for example, address the perception changes. As described further below, the one or more remedial actions may include adjustments to the recipient's operational map to reverse the one or more perception changes.

A system synchronizes a PC exhibiting latency of operations to a biosensor enabled microcontroller with real-time clock by providing an encoding scheme that captures the subject's absolute reaction time transmits the subject's reaction time from the PC exhibiting latency to the microcontroller with real-time clock. The system includes a transmitter that transmits a stimulus signal from the PC exhibiting latency, an input device indicating the subject's response to the stimulus signal, an encoding circuit adapted to encode a difference in time between the stimulus signal and the subject's response to the stimulus signal, an emitter adapted to transmit the encoded difference signal representing the subject's reaction time, and a complementary receiver adapted to detect the encoded difference signal. The receiver includes a decoding circuit that decodes the encoded difference signal to determine the subject's reaction time, and the receiver provides the subject's reaction time to the microcontroller with real-time clock for synchronization with received biosensor data such as EEG data.