I-Corps: Diagnostic tool for Auditory Processing Disorder

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of a diagnostic device for auditory processing disorder (APD). Individuals with APD cannot communicate effectively in situations with background sound, which is debilitating. This can lead to social isolation and reduced employment opportunities. An estimated 25 million Americans suffer from APD, including veterans with traumatic brain injury. However, a substantial diagnostic challenge in audiological practice is that patients with comparable peripheral hearing often have vastly different treatment outcomes. APD could be a valuable addition to the list of candidate tests.This I-Corps project explores translation of a screening device that delivers an APD test battery via calibrated headphones, enabling patient testing of audiometric pure tone thresholds, speech intelligibility in the presence of different types of background sound - speech or noise, in multiple languages, gap detection, and sound localization. Behavioral APD test batteries may be a highly cost-effective way to screen for APD. Moreover, the device will allow testing in multiple languages, increasing the number of eligible patients. Later, the goal is to provide an additional, proprietary score to diagnose an individual’s vulnerability to APD.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.