Educational approach of a BAER recording system based on experiential learning

Abstract

Brainstem Auditory Evoked Response (BAER) represents the electrical activity of the auditory nerve associated to a stimulus. The recording process of this signal is a challenging milestone that requires the development of multidisciplinary competences. Current medical devices able to record BAER are expensive and are not usually flexible enough for education purposes. This paper presents a full description of a BAER recording system designed and developed in our research group. The performance of this system is evaluated by (a) the recording of a very low amplitude synthesized signal similar in morphology to an evoked potential, (b) an analysis of the quality of the recordings in terms of the number of averaged responses and (c) the recording of BAER from eight normal hearing adults and an analysis of the influence of intensity of stimulation over the biological responses. In addition, this paper proposes the described BAER recording system to be used as a teaching tool in the context of electronics engineering, telecommunication engineering, computer sciences, and audiology studies. The lowcost and open nature of this system is appropriate for education purposes. The BAER recording system described in this paper has been used in a laboratory session. The results obtained on a satisfaction survey given to the students reveal that the use of experiential learning as pedagogical model has a great impact on the motivation of students and proves its efficiency to enhance retention and improve cognitive skills. The educational advantages of our system in comparison to other biomedical devices are discussed on this paper.