Writer: Salvador Paez
Health and Fitness

A hearing test measures the sensitivity and accuracy of one's hearing. This is usually done by an audiologist using an audiometer. The audiometer is a device that can be controlled by computer and contains embedded hardware and ear phones/plugs.

Before the actual test proceeds, the audiologist will ask the person that will be undergoing the test about his or her history with hearing impairment. The questions would center on what type of typical noises the person is exposed to regularly, including how loud and how often they occur. The audiologist would aim to find possible causes of the damaged hearing. Questions about past illness should also be expected, as there are a lot of physical disorders that affect hearing loss. Some diseases or illnesses indirectly cause hearing impairment. The audiologist needs to know about these things to come up with a solution that is as accurate as possible.

Next, the audiologist would proceed to actually look inside the person's ear. The ocular inspection involves the use of a device called the otoscope. This is a cone shaped little scope with a light at the end. It helps see into a person's ear and check for any abnormalities of the ear canal or eardrum.

The hearing test itself is conducted in a sound booth with the patient wearing earphones or ear inserts that are connected to the audiometer. The audiometer produces tones of different levels and frequencies, which are transmitted to each individual ear.

The audiologist charts the loudness at the speech frequencies on his audiogram. An audiogram is the graphical representation of how well each ear responds to the frequencies played by the audiologist. The patient who is inside the sound booth will raise his or her hand or press a button when he or she hears the sound being sent to each ear. The audiologist plots all the information and analyzes which frequencies the patient could actually here, determining the extent of the hearing loss if there is any.