A Novel Design of a Portable Otoacoustic Emissions Detecting System Based on ARM

Most traditional designs of otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) detecting system adopt the model of "sensor + sound signal sampler / generator + personal computer". This kind of model has shortcomings that it is apt to introduce exterior noises and lacks system integration, which often brings much inconvenience into the process of measuring. There are also some other OAEs detecting systems that use a digital signal processor (DSP) to collect and process the OAEs response signals, but a DSP is not a best choice to perform as a control unit on a portable device for that they usually do not have many peripheral hardware interfaces and are relatively demanding in cost. Different from the fore-mentioned two kinds of control unit, ARM is a kind of elegant new design, with a complete set of common system peripherals, to provide hand-held devices with low-cost and high-performance microcontroller solution in small die size. In this article, a novel design of a highly integrated and network-accessed portable otoacoustic emissions detecting system based on ARM (mainly for TEOAE and DPOAE) is presented. In addition, a comparison of the differences in the system's real-time performance based on different microcontroller units is provided to justify the use of ARM.