Review of Smart Services for Tinnitus Self-Help, Diagnostics and Treatments

Abstract

In the recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the potential of internet- and smartphone-based technologies for the support of tinnitus patients. A broad spectrum of relevant approaches, some in the form of studies, others in the form of market products, have been mentioned in literature. They include auditory treatments, internet-based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (iCBT), serious games, and questionnaires for tinnitus monitoring. The goal of this study is to highlight the role of existing internet-based and smart technologies for the advancement of tinnitus clinical practice: we consider contributions that refer to treatments and diagnostics, and we include contributions refering to self-help measures. We elaborate on the potential and challenges of such solutions and identify constraints associated to their deployment, such as the demand for familiarity with internet-based services and the need to re-design interactive services so that they fit on the small surface of a smartwatch.

Keywords: iCBT; internet-based treatments; mobile crowd sensing; smart technologies; tinnitus; tinnitus masking; tinnitus monitoring; tinnitus treatment.

Figure 1

Co-Authorship network: (i) Node size and node color intensity reflect the number of articles that this author wrote and were found relevant for our review; the larger and darker, the higher the number (e.g., Gerhard Andersson has the most works with 21, next is Viktor Kaldo with 7) (ii) Edge thickness and edge color intensity reflect the number of articles co-authored by the nodes linked through the edge; the thicker and darker, the higher the number (e.g., the thickest edge connects Gerhard Andersson and Cornelia Weise, who have co-authored 7 articles). We used the Sci2 Tool [https://sci2.cns.iu.edu/] to extract the network from the bibtex file containing all papers that were identified as relevant. After extracting the network, we used Gephi [https://gephi.org/] (which can be directly called through the Sci2 Tool), to draw the graph. After picking parameters for the colors and size of nodes and edges, we used the layout algorithm “Fruchterman Reingold,” which is implemented in Gephi, for achieving a more visually appealing graph-layout.