HEARING DETECTION

Hearing loss means a decrease in the ability to hear sounds, and is actually a disability that is never seen with the naked eye but is considered a severe disability. The prevalence of hearing loss is approximately 28 times that of phenylketonuria, 8 times that of hypothyroidism, 5 times that of cystic fibrosis, and 20 times that of hemoglobinopathy. Therefore, this problem is considered to be the most common birth defect in infants.

Children with hearing loss detected before the age of six months have a much better vocabulary than children diagnosed with hearing loss after the age of six months. If the infant or child has hearing loss and for diagnosis, treatment and Rehabilitation should be done late, after a while it will suffer from the complications of hearing loss. Hearing screening is a necessary, cost-effective, and universal process for early detection and diagnosis of neonatal hearing loss worldwide at birth for all newborns. In this process, infants after hearing tests are referred to two groups, “referral” and ” Are accepted.

Physiological and electrophysiological criteria are used to detect neonatal hearing loss, including autocoustic emission testing or OAE and auditory brainstem response (ABR) testing. Both OAE and ABR technologies are applied in successful neonatal hearing screening and are highly sensitive. Despite their efficiency, these tests are costly and require a specialist. In addition, in Iran, at least 175 audiometers are needed in the country to be able to cover 50% of deaf screening in the country, while there are far fewer of these devices in the country.

Because screening is not the goal of the final diagnosis and assignment is one of the two options of “acceptance” and referral, it would be desirable to find less costly alternatives.

Before a child can communicate through language and speech, he communicates through sound. Crying is one of the ways a child communicates with others. This is the first sound experience to be produced by laryngeal and oral movements in addition to the ability to hear, an auditory feedback that is used very quickly to produce phonemes.

In this study, using signal processing knowledge and obtaining infant / infant crying signal, after identifying different aspects of infant and infant crying sound, a software package has been presented to distinguish between normal and hearing impaired cases that can be used in infant hearing screening. Was.