Inside the snug confines of the human ear lies a bony structure, curly and shaped like a seashell. This structure, called the cochlea, contains little hairy cells that vibrate when sounds pass through. These slight vibrations emerge as faint sounds—hard to detect, but still traceable—and they are different in healthy ears compared to those with hearing loss.
Detecting these faint sounds, known as otoacoustic emissions, could be the key to screening for hearing loss among children in low-resource countries, where audiology equipment can be hard to come by. Traditional devices can cost thousands of dollars. Now, in Nature Biomedical Engineering, a team at the University of Washington writes that they have
→ Continue reading at Wired - Science