=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3073/paper12
|storemode=property
|title=HAO: Hearing Aid Ontology
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3073/paper12.pdf
|volume=Vol-3073
|authors=Maria Ausilia Napoli-Spatafora
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/icbo/Spatafora21
}}
==HAO: Hearing Aid Ontology==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3073/paper12.pdf
HAO: Hearing Aid Ontology
Maria Ausilia Napoli-Spatafora1
1
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Catania, Italy
Abstract
Hearing loss is the partial or complete inability to detect sound in one or both ears. This disorder is very
common and can be associated with other pathologic expressions. The hearing loss plays an important
role in the life of individuals and it is defined as social problem because it is a communication barrier and
language development impediment. The most common treatment for it is the hearing aid that makes
sound audible to the people affected by an hearing loss. This contribution describes the first ontology
about the hearing aids collecting all the existing knowledge on these medical devices.
Keywords
hearing loss, hearing aid, human ear
1. Introduction
Hearing impairment (or hearing loss) is a common sensory disorder that is defined as the partial
or complete inability to detect sound in one or both ears. This diverse pathology is associated
with a myriad of phenotypic expressions and affects adults and children. It is a communication
barrier and language development impediment. Therefore, it can have a huge effect on one’s
quality of life [1]. Most of the time, the best treatment is the use of a hearing aid that is a device
designed to improve hearing by making sound audible to a person with hearing loss. Actually,
hearing aids are medical devices.
Hotchkiss et al [2] have released the first ontology about the hearing impairment called Hear-
ing Impairment Ontology (HIO)1 . It is built around the central concept of ‘Hearing Impairment’.
The main class of HIO is ‘Hearing Impairment’ that defines the classification of this disease
from four points of views which are cause, ear affected, onset, and physiopathology mechanism.
HIO cites hearing aids as a treatment for hearing impairment without going into detail and
defines the cochlear implant as a different class. This choice can be considered semantically
correct since the cochlear implant is a medical device with the same goal of a hearing aid but
differs from it because of its functioning. This fact implicates that the hearing aid modelling
does not fit for the cochlear implant. For this reason, my contribution is a comprehensive
knowledge of only hearing aids from the point of view of commercial activities of these devices.
This work describes the Hearing Aid Ontology2 (HAO) that collects for the first time existing
knowledge of hearing aids and their manufacturing companies. HAO could be consulted by
International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies 2021, September 16–18, 2021, Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
Envelope-Open m.napolispatafora@studium.unict.it (M. A. Napoli-Spatafora)
© 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
Workshop
Proceedings
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ISSN 1613-0073
1
Available here purl.obolibrary.org/obo/hio/releases/2019-10-31/hio.owl
2
It will be free available here https://github.com/ausilianapoli/HAO-Hearing-Aid-Ontology under the Creative
Common Attribution 4.0 Unported License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
everyone through a SPARQL endpoint or a web application.
2. Proposed Ontology
The HAO is built around the central concept of ‘Hearing Aid’. The classes of the HAO reproduce
the technical characteristics of hearing aids. There are different types (i.e. ontology class Types )
which vary in size, placing and technology and each of them is a class:
• BAHA which stands for Bone Anchored Hearing Aid: it is a surgically implanted auditory
prosthetic based on bone conduction; it can not be surgically implanted temporarily.
• BTE which stands for Behind The Ear: it is one of two major classes of hearing aids. They
consist of a case that hangs behind the pinna.
• CROS which stands for Contralateral Routing Of Signals; it is a hearing aid that transmits
auditory information from one side of the head to the other side of the head. Candidates
include people who have poor word understanding on one side, no hearing on one side,
or who are not benefiting from a hearing aid on one side.
• Eyeglasses_Aids : sounds are transmitted via a receiver attached from the arm of the
spectacles which are fitted firmly behind the boney portion of the skull at the back of the
ear (mastoid process) by means of pressure applied on the arm of the spectacles.
• ITE which stands for In The Ear; it is the other major class of hearing aids. These custom
devices fit in the outer ear bowl (called the concha) or inside the ear canal completely.
Another main class is Configurations that contains configurations of each type of hearing
aids: for example, a BTE hearing aid can have or not the receiver in the canal, or an ITE hearing
aid can be completely hidden in the ear canal or not. All existing configurations are inserted as
individuals and for each type they are:
• BAHA configurations:
– Surgical_Implant ;
– Softband or Headband (they are semantically the same thing and this fact is mod-
elled in the ontology using the property owl:sameAs ).
• BTE configurations:
– RIC which stands for Receiver In the Canal or RITE which stands for Receiver In
The Ear (modeled as being essentially the same thing by means of the property
owl:sameAs );
– No-RIC or No-RITE (i.e., the counterpart of the previous).
• CROS configurations:
– Air_Conduction_Cros : on the impaired side, a microphone is encased in a behind
the ear (BTE) styled case or a custom, in the ear (ITE) piece; the receiver is on the
other ear.
– BiCROS : this system is utilized in patients who have single sided deafness who also
have hearing loss in their better hearing ear; in addition to the configuration included
in the CROS system, the BiCROS includes microphones on the better hearing side
and both microphones are amplified and presented to the better hearing ear.
• Eyeglasses_Aids configuration is Bone_Conduction_Spectacles that means specta-
cles of eyeglasses contains bone receiver.
• ITE configurations:
– ITC which stands for In The Canal;
– CIC which stands for Completely In the Canal;
– IIC which stands for Invisible In the Canal;
The ontology contains other individuals representing existing models of hearing aid produced
by different main manufacturers; each of them is an instance of the appropriate class and is
modeled using the following object/data properties:
• Object Properties:
– hasConfiguration which has Types as domain and Configurations as range; its
inverse is isConfigurationOf ;
– isDesignedFor which has Types as domain and {Adult, Child} as range; its
inverse is hasDedicated ;
– forHearingLossSeverity which has Types as domain and {Mild-Moderate, Moderate-
Severe, Severe-Profound} as range; its inverse is canBeTreatedBy .
• Data Properties:
– hasConnectivity which has Types as domain and xsd:boolean as range;
– hasTelecoil which has Types as domain and xsd:boolean as range;
– hasWebSite which has Types as domain and xsd:string as range;
– isDigital which has Types as domain and xsd:boolean as range;
– isRechargeable which has Types as domain and xsd:boolean as range.
The above-mentioned properties are useful to define some classes as existential restrictions.
Figure 1 gives an overview of the class hierarchy in HAO that will be described in detail (here
the name of the root class is the qualified name of the class Hearing Aid in the HIO from which
the proposed ontology is derived).
The human ear perceives sound waves by air conduction and bone conduction and so hearing
aids are classified by the way of conduction. For this reason, there is the class Conduction that
has, as subclasses, the classes Air_Conduction (i.e., the outer ear directs sound waves from
the external environment to the tympanic membrane that transmits them to the inner ear by
the ossicular chain) and Bone_Conduction (i.e., sound can reach the inner ear by conduction
through the bones of the skull because it produces vibrations of the skull that are passed on the
inner ear). Air_Conduction and Bone_Conduction are disjoint classes.
Another distinctive element for a hearing aid is whom will use it because some devices are
specifically designed for adults or children. This is modeled using the class Hearing_Aid_Designed_For
having as subclasses the classes Hearing_Aid_For_Adult and Hearing_Aid_For_Child .
Figure 1: Class hierarchy in HAO.
Hearing aids have various functionalities and currently, these can be grouped into three
main types i.e., connectivity, rechargeability, and telecoil. This is represented by the class
Hearing_Aid_Functionalities and its three subclasses Hearing_Aid_Connectivity (recent
hearing aids support connectivity because they can be fitted wireless and can receive sound di-
rectly from TV, phones, and Bluetooth microphone/speaker), Hearing_Aid_Rechargeability
(the power alimentation can be zinc-air button battery or lithium rechargeable battery), and
Hearing_Aid_Telecoil (the signal inside the phone’s speaker is picked up by the hearing aid’s
telecoil i.e. a special loop of wire inside the hearing aid).
Hearing aids can be classified by hearing loss severity too. For example, some of them
are not powerful enough for severe hearing loss. Three levels of severity of hearing loss are
indicated and they are Mild-Moderate, Moderate-Severe, and Severe-Profound. To represent
this in the ontology I introduced the class Hearing_Loss_Severity having three subclasses
Hearing_Loss_Mild-Moderate , Hearing_Loss_Moderate-Severe , and Hearing_Loss_Severe-
Profound . Finally, hearing aids can be analogical or digital according to their internal circuit.
The ontology contains the class Hearing_Aid_Technology with its two subclasses Analogical_Hearing_Aid
and Digital_Hearing_Aid . Analogical_Hearing_Aid and Digital_Hearing_Aid are dis-
joint classes. Worth noticing that Analogical_Hearing_Aid is an empty class because today
all existing hearing aids are digital yet. I nevertheless put this class in this ontology for com-
pleteness of the topic.
HAO has been developed in OWL 2 using the Protégé 3 editor and classified using the Pellet 4 ,
FaCT++ 1.6.5 5 , and HermiT 1.4.3.456 6 reasoners.
3. Use Cases
The proposed ontology could be a handbook for everyone gets involved in the topic of hearing
aid. For this reason, its maintenance updating and adding of instances is significant.
In the field of hearing aids, there are two parts (i.e. clinicians and patients) separated by the
hearing aid dispenser that is the most technical figure in this context. The clinicians take care of
their patients evaluating the presence and the entity of the hearing loss and suggesting the type
of a hearing aid. Next, the patients address their trusted hearing aid dispenser that offers them
the best solution. In this process both clinicians and patients benefit from the HAO: the former
could suggest specifically a hearing aid configuration and also a model based on the feedback of
all own patients over time; the latter, instead, could understand better and explore the hearing
aid subject, and independently compare the technical characteristics of own hearing aid with
the others on the market.
4. Conclusion
In this note, I have briefly presented HAO that is an ontology collecting all existing knowledge
about hearing aids. This ontology is the first in its field and standardizes human-and-machine-
readable resources. It unambiguously defines concepts and terminology around hearing aids for
researchers, patients, and clinicians. In the future, this ontology can become the back-end of a
web service useful for clinical practice. People with no medical and technical knowledge could
know and understand this subject. While, anyone, who is experienced, could be guided in the
choice of a specific hearing aid model whose characteristics are clinical picture compliant.
References
[1] A. Shukla, M. Harper, E. Pedersen, A. Goman, J. J. Suen, C. Price, J. Applebaum, M. Hoyer,
F. R. Lin, N. S. Reed, Hearing loss, loneliness, and social isolation: A systematic review,
Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery 162 (2020) 622–633.
[2] J. Hotchkiss, N. Manyisa, S. Mawuli Adadey, O. G. Oluwole, E. Wonkam, K. Mnika, A. Yal-
couye, V. Nembaware, M. Haendel, N. Vasilevsky, N. J. Mulder, S. Jupp, A. Wonkam,
G. K. Mazandu, The Hearing Impairment Ontology: A Tool for Unifying Hearing Im-
pairment Knowledge to Enhance Collaborative Research, Genes 10 (2019). doi:10.3390/
genes10120960 .
3
http://protege.stanford.edu
4
https://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/Pellet
5
http://owl.cs.manchester.ac.uk/tools/fact/
6
http://hermit-reasoner.com