[Technology Review]

… A new smart-phone app called ACEHearing aims to address this via a simple test that diagnoses a user’s specific form of hearing loss and customizes the output of a mobile device to better match the listener’s ability to hear. Andrew van Hasselt, who chairs the ear, nose, and throat department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and who is one of the principal developers of ACEHearing, says the app is just a proof-of-concept prototype for a larger effort to add the functionality as a standard to phones and other devices that produce sound.

During the test, performed with headphones, the device plays sounds across a range of frequencies and asks whether the user can hear them. The software adjusts the device’s audio output by amplifying the most troublesome frequencies. This is important, because a smart-phone user who has trouble discerning speech because he can’t hear certain frequencies will gain nothing by simply turning up the volume.  …

Read the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/39149/?nlid=nldly&nld=2011-11-17