With the Virtual Audiometer's Profile Maker, custom-designed patients can be created for students to test. Customization allows instructors and students to focus on particular hearing problems and testing methods, both increasing learning opportunities and hastening skill acquisition.
Profile Maker allows control of the following variables in your virtual patients:
- Gender
- Age (child, adult, geriatric)
- Right and left ear air/bone conduction thresholds
- Interaural attenuation for supra-aural, insert, and bone conduction at each test frequency
- Speech reception thresholds
- Word recognition scores
- Psychometric function slopes for each test
- Patient variability during testing (none, low, medium, high)
By adjusting these variables, any patient situation can be created that a student might come across in the real world, without the hassle of gathering, screening, and compensating test volunteers.
Because each patient is custom designed, the Profile Maker allows comparison of student's test results to the actual patient results. This feature helps the instructor and student identify quickly areas in which improvement is needed. Another tool to help evaluate student progress is the Session Viewer.