Tinnitus Simulation Project

Hey guys!

I am a Belgian student at the Howest school, studying to become an industrial designer.

We got an assignment to develop a product that simulates tinnitus, to make people more aware of this problem.

Me and my partner are still in development stage, our idea now is to get a little machine that produces a sound matching the 'beep' tinnitus patients experience.

We would connect this machine to some headphones. And make an extension to get the headphones near the ears but not in them (it would disturb the sounds coming in).

Now, we are still missing a vital part. We have not found a machine that can be programmed to a certain sound and an audio output.

We would appreciate any kind of help, tips and insight to the problem.
(even your experiences, and ideas to recreate how it feels to have tinnitus would be great.

Felix de Hoog, Laurens Callewaert
1IPO5
Howest
Belgium

 

A simple mp3 player would do.

 

My tinnitus you could not simulate unless you wanted someone to have permanent hearing damage in about 2 minutes listening to it. My tinnitus sits between 9khz and 18khzish. The human ear does not pick up external sounds in these ultra high pitches very well to begin with so you would have to turn them to ear damaging levels to simulate what I hear. When you get it loud enough to where it inflicts pain, this would be somewhere around the level that I experience 24 7, unfortunately at that point you may have tinnitus yourself from listening to it. I guess that would cause a lot of people to become aware. Give em T and they will definitely be careful in the future. Haha

 

You have a tinnitus sound generator in thé ATA site

 

Stichting hoormij/nvvs.nl can provide a cd with tinnitus sounds.