• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.410-414
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• 2013

As one of the effective methods for researching the objective tinnitus detection, the GPIAS (Gap Pre-pulse Inhibition of Acoustic Startle) measurement has been used to verify the existence of animal tinnitus objectively. The level and pattern of the background sound presented prior to a startle pulse are closely related with the GPIAS results. But the effect of the starting point of the background sound on animal startle responses has not been reported yet. In this paper, we present the implementation of a GPIAS measurement system based on an unconstrained enclosure to avoid animals' excessive constraint stress and deal with the animals' growth. After the performance of our implemented system has been tested through the animal experiment using 4 SD-rats, the effect of starting point of stimulus background sound on the startle response has been studied by the use of our implemented system. Through the results, it is verified that our system can measure the inhibition of animal startle responses due the gap pre-pulse for GPIAS calculation and the background sound starting point does not significantly effect on the startle response and the GPIAS values if the background sound continues for more than 300msec before a gap pre-pulse is presented.

• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.45-50
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• 2013

Recently, a method for detecting animal tinnitus objectively, gap prepulse inhibition of acoustic startling (GPIAS) were reported. However, the GPIAS method is difficult to be directly applied to human tinnitus research because measuring repeatedly startling responses evoked by more than 110 dB SPL acoustic stimuli for human is not easy. In this paper, the auditory late latency response (ALLR) measurement system which can measure conveniently evoked potentials involving the information about the brain cortical activity related with auditory psychologic phenomena such as a tinnitus has been implemented. By using the implemented system, 8 persons with normal hearing sense have been experimented to measure N1-P2 amplitudes of ALLRs evoked by gap prepulse based acoustic stimuli. Through the experimental results, the prepulse inhibitions of all the participants' N1-P2 responses have been observed and their characteristics were evaluated. And it is verified that our implemented system can be utilized as a device for researching and evaluating the objective tinnitus detection method in the future study.