AHead Simulations announced the release of a new CARL platform, reportedly the company’s first product overhaul since CARL’s introduction to hearing healthcare in 2019. This new platform includes an update of all existing CARL units as well as a new CARL model that allows users to simulate audiometry and conduct audio analysis, called Audio CARL. All new products will be available for a hands-on demo at the AAA Annual Conference in St Louis, Missouri, March 30 – April 1.

CARL is a patient simulator formulated for the hearing healthcare industry. CARL is currently used in university settings, clinics, and industry for a variety of tasks including training, research, and product demonstrations, according to the company. The new CARL platform builds upon and incorporates feedback from CARL users globally.

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“It has been incredibly rewarding and exciting to see how creative the hearing healthcare community has been in finding new and exciting use cases for our patient simulator, CARL,” said Rob Koch, President and Founder, AHead Simulations. “Even though CARL began as a tool for training programs to conduct better training, we have seen a multitude of uses outside of academia. This new platform is to accommodate many of the new and old use cases we’ve seen, and build the most asked-for next step into CARL – the ability for CARL to ‘hear.”

AHead’s new Audio CARL unit contains:

  • Microphones mounted at CARL’s eardrum for in-canal sound recordings;
  • SPL meter functionality for quantification and visualization of sound delivered to CARL’s eardrum;
  • Audiometry functionality allowing users to “test” CARL’s hearing across a range of representative hearing losses.

This new Audio CARL unit has been in development and undergoing validation at the National Centre for Audiology for the past two years. A large-scale validation of the audiometry functionality is currently being completed.

“We’ve been working with AHead on developing audiometry simulation with CARL for several years,” said Susan Scollie, director of the National Centre for Audiology in London, Ontario, Canada. “We really wanted to be able to use CARL for audiometry so that our students can practice with real audiometers. We program CARL with specific audiograms and are asking students and instructors to test CARL’s thresholds and to provide feedback on what they think of the simulator. Our early data look very promising, with good agreement between the audiograms and the test results, and high ratings of CARL’s usefulness as an audiometry simulator. We plan to finish this work and share it with the field as soon as we can.”

AHead will be exhibiting at AAA 2022 at Booth 404. Attendees can stop by for a hands-on demo of the all-new CARL to see how this new tool can be used. The Audio CARL unit will be available for a limited launch pre-order as of March 30, 2022.

For more information, contact AHead Simulations at: [email protected], 1-855-560-CARL, or find more information by visiting AHead’s information page.

Source: AHead Simulations

Image: AHead Simulations