İşitmeAtölyesiAudiogram Reading Practice
Practise reading randomly generated audiograms. Start by recognising the symbols, move on to interpreting the type and degree of loss, then to plotting thresholds yourself and to reading tympanometry, acoustic reflexes and speech tests together. After every answer you are shown not only the correct one but which thresholds it came from.
For educational use · cases are generated at random and belong to no real patient · the tool can be wrong
- 4 exercisesfrom symbols to case files
- Levelledor free practice
- Reasoned feedbackwhich threshold it came from
What does this symbol show?
Recognising the symbols is the first requirement for reading an audiogram. A single symbol is shown below; pick the ear, the pathway and whether masking was used, then check your answer. It is a short warm-up and works comfortably on a phone.
This tool draws masked air-conduction measurements as a square around the unmasked symbol. In the ANSI S3.21 and ASHA 1990 set the same measurements are marked with a trianglefor the right ear and a square for the left ear; those are the ones you will see in exams and in most publications. Bone-conduction symbols are the same in both sets: unmasked < and >, masked [ and ].
Read the audiogram, describe the loss
You are given a case history and an audiogram; you state the type and degree of loss for each ear, then the relationship between the ears. On the levelled path the cases get harder as you go; if you want to work on a particular pattern, pick it from free choice.
We give the numbers, you plot the audiogram
Interpreting requires recognising the symbols; plotting requires putting them in the right place. The measurements are written in the table below. Use the controls above the chart to pick the ear, the pathway and masking, then mark the thresholds. When you check your work, wrong symbols, missed points and extra marks are counted separately.
| Hz | Right air | Right bone | Left air | Left bone |
|---|
M marks a measurement made under masking, and NR means no response was obtained up to the output limit of the audiometer. Use the masked symbol for masked measurements and the arrowed symbol for frequencies with no response.
Read the tests together
In the clinic an audiogram never arrives on its own. This section gives you tympanometry, acoustic reflexes, otoacoustic emissions and speech tests alongside the thresholds. Do the tests support one another, or is there an inconsistency that needs explaining? After describing the loss, also mark the most striking finding in the file.
Where are you struggling?
The numbers below are kept in this browser only and are sent nowhere. They reset on a different device or when you clear your browser data.
You can work on the case you looked at last. The link carries the thresholds inside it and can be set as homework.
Opens the number of cases you chose as a single printable page with blank answer lines; the answer key comes on a separate page with the type, the degree and the reasoning.
The cases and answer keys are produced by a calculation engine that applies established clinical criteria. Because the engine works from fixed rules it has limits: the decision on degree and type rests on the four-frequency pure-tone average and the air-bone gap, so a loss confined to the high frequencies can look normal in the average, and an asymmetry at a single frequency may go unnoticed. The generated cases are also simplified versions of typical patterns; not every picture you meet in the clinic fits them.
If you think a piece of feedback is wrong or debatable, you may well be right. In that case trust your source and write to us; every example you report helps us correct the tool. This page is here to help you study; it is not clinical decision support or a diagnostic tool.