Background and Aim: Hearing assessment in infants and children younger than two years is an important issue, because the golden time of the language learning and speaking is under the age of two. Steady state auditory evoked potentials (SSAEPs) is one of the best ways of the objective hearing assessment for infants and young children. The need for long time of stimulation and recording restricted the clinical uses of this method. Therefore, the reduction of the recording time is a common problem. SSAEP signals are contaminated with background EEG signals of the brain and nervous system. To discriminate these signals the approach is using averaging method.
Materials and Methods: In this work two adaptive methods were programmed and tried on (SSAEP) signals. The first method was the work of the Ziarani et al. and the second was the enhanced Kalman filter. To assess suggested methods and to compare them with traditional averaging one, two sets of clinical signals prepared with Rotmen research group in university of Toronto were applied.
Results: The speed of the extraction of the SSAEP signals with the Ziarani method is 1.6 times faster than the averaging method. The extraction time of the enhanced adaptive Kalman filter is 13.1 times faster than currently used averaging methods.
Conclusion: The Kalman filter method seems to be more reliable than the other two methods. In addition, this new application of the Kalman filter in hearing assessment could be more beneficial and faster than other methods as an objective method.