Abstract
Tinnitus is an annoying ringing in the ears, in varying shades and intensities. Tinnitus can affect a patient’s overall health and social well-being. The diagnostic procedure of tinnitus usually consists of three steps: an audiological examination, psychoacoustic measurement, and a disability evaluation. The authors recently started a project whose aim is to provide a low-cost device and an app to patients, supporting the self-management of tinnitus. In this short paper, we report on the study finalised to evaluate the improved design of the acufenometry examination (i.e., the identification of the frequency and intensity of the tinnitus). By measuring the task with the Single-Ease Question metric, the average rating increased from 2.86/5 for the first implementation, to 3.96/5 for the re-design and re-implementation (\(p=0.0005\)). The results show that the perceived usability of the acufenometry task actually improved from the initial implementation to the new one.
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Notes
- 1.
Unused for the acufenometry, the device is equipped with both air and bone transducers, which are instead essential for the pure tone audiometry testing.
- 2.
We preferred a non-parametric test instead of the parametric t-test because both EM and SEQ are qualitative measures, even if numerically expressed in a Likert-scale ranging from 1 to 5.
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Vittorini, P., Chamoso, P., De la Prieta, F. (2022). Acufenometry in the Self-management of Tinnitus: A Revised Interface to Improve the User Experience. In: Rocha, M., Fdez-Riverola, F., Mohamad, M.S., Casado-Vara, R. (eds) Practical Applications of Computational Biology & Bioinformatics, 15th International Conference (PACBB 2021). PACBB 2021. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 325. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86258-9_3
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