Christine Tan: My background on audiology has really helped fuel my interest in helping people with hearing problems and tinnitus and to receive an RNID Research Award.
Part of the aim of the project is to make use of simple methods of measurements to provide us with detailed information about how the inner ear works. We try to make our methods very easy to use because we have clinical implementation in mind and we hope that the data we collect will help provide us with more information about how to make treatments for tinnitus a bit better.
Florence: My biggest problem with tinnitus is when I'm alone in the house. It comes in various forms. Sometimes I get a very high pitched whistle. Most of the time it is as though I am in the cockpit of an aeroplane. But when I'm alone I don't know if the noise is in my ear or if there is a fire in the house.
Christine Tan: The current way of treating tinnitus at the moment includes fitting hearing aids for a person who has a hearing loss, providing noise maskers or asking the patient to attend tinnitus retraining therapy. We hope that the data that we collect will help improve the way maskers – noise maskers – are made or to improve hearing algorithms as well.
This research is really important because we know that tinnitus affects about 10% of the adult population of the UK. We know that it affects people with a hearing loss but what we don't know is why it affects some people more than others. And we also don't know why some people with normal hearing have tinnitus and, more importantly, we don't really know why some treatments work for some people and not for others.
So these are all the questions that we need to ask and find answers to. But before we think about improving our treatment methods we have to make sure that we do our measurements properly. This is because we also believe that the current method of measuring hearing and tinnitus doesn't provide us with enough information so that is part of what we hope to achieve here.