One can imagine that future commerc

One can imagine that future commercially available instruments will incorporate some of the advances described in this chapter so that clinicians can more easily exploit these advances to improve assessment of patients in the real world of audiologic clinics. I will dream about such an instrument in the hopes that manufacturers will be inspired to make the next generation of tools available for improved clinical use. The ideal clinical instrument will provide age-appropriate normative references for level and SNR for the major classes of OAEs (e.g., DPOAEs, TEOAEs). It will allow measurement and comparisons with wideband middle ear absorbance, and use a middle-ear power absorbance feature along with pressurization to allow middle ear effects on the OAE to be lessened. The instrument will allow rapid testing of DP-grams I/O functions along with a smart algorithm that estimates the degree of hearing the loss in different frequency regions. It will use chirps in place of clicks to provide a higher-frequency assessment of TEOAEs. Finally, it will include the feature of MOCR contralateral noise suppression to test for efferent function. Such an instrument will be incredibly sophisticated, and I doubt that all of these features will be available for some time, but I predict that in the next 5 years we will see the most promising new features added to clinical instruments to allow clinicians to take advantage of these improved tools.