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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 Bala and his colleagues thought they might be able to use this pupillary dilation response (PDR) to measure a person's ability to hear.
To test this theory, they recruited 22 healthy volunteers and asked them to listen to a variety of noises. While they were listening to the sounds, their eye movements were tracked by a camera. In this study, the subject kept their heads still by placing their chin in a chin rest, but Bala said that if a camera were mounted far enough away from the subject, they wouldn't need to be still. Or, he said, it's possible that they could use a pair of specialized goggles to detect changes in pupil size.
They found that when a novel sound was introduced, the pupils in human eyes dilated, and if the sound was repeated numerous times, the volunteers quickly became habituated to the sound. To counter this habituation, the researchers varied the sounds.
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For 11 of the study participants, the researchers also asked when they heard a certain noise and compared those results to those obtained by the pupil response, and found that the results were very similar, within three decibels.
Results of the study were to be presented Tuesday at the Association for Research in Otolaryngology meeting in Phoenix.
Diane Sabo, director of the division of audiology and communication disorders at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, said the findings were "intriguing" and that a three-decibel difference was very small.
"Any time you work with babies and young children, you're always looking for a physiological response, because they can't tell you anything," she said. She did express concern that in this study, the participants kept their head still, because that's something that definitely won't happen with babies and young children.
"This sounds really interesting, but whether it can translate into a useful clinical tool is probably a long way off," said Sabo.
More information
Read this information from the Nemours Foundation to learn the signs to watch for that might indicate your baby has a hearing problem.
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