Founded in London, Canada, AHead Simulations is a company dedicated to improving clinical care through advanced simulation, providing clinicians, educators, and students with a simulated patient. AHead initially recognized a training gap within hearing health training programs, and started designing a simulated hearing loss patient to enable more effective education in hearing healthcare. Over the years, AHead developed and released CARL manikins to training programs, industry, and clinics around the world. In 2022, the company concluded its development for an advanced modular manikin, named Audio CARL, which is now officially released.
Audio CARL is a manikin designed to simulate a hearing loss patient, allowing users to practice with real audiometers to 'test' CARLs hearing. Microphones mounted at CARL’s eardrum are enabled for in-canal sound recordings and SPL meter functionality for quantification and visualization of sound delivered to CARL’s eardrum, enabling accessible education and research. Audiometry functionality allows users to “test” CARLs hearing across a range of representative hearing losses.
As AHead explains, the new manikin resulted from the feedback received since 2019, requesting the introduction for audio functionalities from users of they previous generation CARL manikin. The company collaborated with Canada's National Centre for Audiology to bring it to reality and since the first units received positive feedback, the company was encouraged to move to volume production. Pre-orders opened in March 2022 and the first production batch was quickly sold out. Audio CARL is now scheduled to be generally available in Fall 2022. All CARL manikins are being manufactured in facilities located in Cambridge Ontario.
CARL initially resulted from an engineering student project at Western University, where the first prototypes were made and tested in 2015 to provide better experiential training in the audiology program. After positive impressions of the first prototype, the project was taken on as a master's thesis by Robert Koch to properly develop and validate the technology and in 2017, CARL received its first validation study with positive results and encouragement for more refinement. After completing its second validation study in 2018, finding students who used the simulator performed better in clinical scenarios, AHead Simulations was founded and CARL was officially launched to international markets in January 2019.
By the end of CARL's first year, CARL attended international conferences, and 50 CARL units found homes in 7 different countries around the world. Replicating the anatomy and acoustics of a human volunteer for any of your uses, CARL was also found to be an effective tool for safe practice and research during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Audio CARL is now an evolved patient-realistic model with head, shoulders, and ears, built to withstand traveling and extended use. The manikin is made to be as modular as possible to support in-head feedback systems and a wide array of ear anatomies available. CARL's hearing can be tested across a range of representative hearing losses and CARL will respond through the activation of LEDs. The lights in Audio CARL's shoulders light up when he hears tones within his hearing threshold during a hearing test.
All Audio CARL manikins are supplied as a ready-to-use complete package, containing documentation, 3 Sets of CARL Ears (One Microphone Light & Dark Pair, One Light & Dark Realistic Pair, and One Clear Durable Pair), power and USB cable for connection, and a Chromebook to run the Audio CARL software.
www.aheadsimulations.com
