Patent ID: 8043203

Claim:
A method for treating tinnitus, comprising: a) generating pure sounds and waiting for a user to press an input button when the user hears the pure sound; b) interpreting hearing characteristics of the user by comparing the result of pressing the input buttons device with equal loudness contours; c) selecting either a tinnitus masking method or a tinnitus retraining therapy according to the hearing characteristics of the user; and d) adjusting and outputting frequency characteristics of a white noise stored in a memory to correspond to the hearing characteristics of the user according to the selected tinnitus therapy, wherein the operation a) includes: a1) generating a pure sound of a predetermined frequency within an audible range; a2) outputting the pure sound to be increasingly louder and detecting the volume of the pure sound heard by the user from the pressing result of the input buttons when the user hears the pure sound or perceives the pure sound that the user is hearing as being suddenly louder; a3) storing the frequency and volume of the pure sound at the time when the user presses the input button; and a4) repeating the operations a1) through a3) while increasing the frequency within the audible range, wherein in the operation a2), the user presses different input buttons whether the user hears the pure sound or the user perceives the pure sound as being suddenly louder, wherein in operation c), the tinnitus masking method is selected when a frequency range where the tinnitus occurs is narrower than a threshold, and the tinnitus retraining method is selected when the frequency range is wider than the threshold.