Quick start: your first audiogram
Ten steps from your dashboard to an audiogram you designed yourself, tested on the audiometer, and kept as a lesson.
Ten steps, about ten minutes: design a patient in the Element Explorer, test them on the audiometer, check your answers, and keep the patient as a lesson. Nothing is saved until you choose to save it, so experiment freely.
1. Open the Element Explorer
On the Dashboard, click the Element Explorer card (Try any test in the simulator). It sits under Theta — beside My workspace on a wider screen.
2. Open the audiometry explorer
Click the Audiometry card (Explore & build). You start with a random patient.
Above the audiogram, Element preset shows which standard you're working in — symbols, interaural attenuation, masking rules. It starts on your own default (Theta's, unless you've chosen another). Switch it and the same patient redraws under the new standard; if you'd like to keep the new one, Make this my default sets it for next time.
3. Design the patient
Under the audiograms, each ear has a profile card — Right Ear Profile and Left Ear Profile. For each ear choose:
- Degree (Min) and Degree (Max) — the range the thresholds fall in.
- Type — Sensorineural, Conductive or Mixed.
- Configuration — Flat, Sloping, Rising, Cookie-bite and so on.
The audiogram redraws as you go. Shuffle draws new thresholds from the same profile — it's a different patient with the same kind of loss.
4. Start a trial run
Click Try in simulator. The audiometer opens with your patient — the pill at the top says Trial run — nothing is saved, so practice freely. When you're done, Back to the explorer returns you to your design exactly as you left it.
5. Set up the tone
On the console, choose the ear, the transducer (air or bone), the stimulus and the frequency. Keyboard users: R / L for the ear, A / B for air or bone, 1–5 for the stimulus.
6. Present a tone
Hold Present — or hold Space — for as long as you want the tone on. The response light shows when the patient hears it.
7. Find and save the threshold
Change the level with − and + (or ↑ / ↓) until you find the softest level the patient reliably hears, then click Save (or press Enter). Pick the next frequency from the frequency box (or press ← / →).
Keys not responding?
The keyboard shortcuts pause while a dropdown — like the frequency box — has focus, so after picking from one with the mouse, click the audiogram before using the keys again.
8. Test both ears, air and bone
Repeat for the right and left ears, by air and by bone. Wherever crossover is possible, switch masking on with Channel 2's On button (or M) — on a phone or tablet, Channel 2 is behind the Channel 2 tab under the console. To check your work, open the gear at the top right and tick Show true thresholds: the patient's real audiogram appears faintly on the same chart, under your symbols.
9. Submit
Click Submit. Trial run results shows your overall score and how each part of the test scored.
10. Save it as a lesson
Liked that patient? Click Save as lesson at the foot of the results. You're back on your design with the save window open: type a Lesson title and click Save lesson. Saved to My workspace confirms it. (Closing the results with × instead just returns you to the design, unsaved.)
If you teach in an organization, the save window also asks Save to: keep it in My workspace — yours alone, exactly as you tried it — or put it straight into an organization's lessons, ready to add to a course. The Instructor guide covers that path.
On a free account, My workspace keeps up to five lessons, each with one element. Audiometry, tympanometry and otoscopy are free to save; Theta Pro removes the limits. Exploring and trying any element is always free.
Run the lesson you saved
Your saved patient is ready whenever you want it, as a real, recorded attempt:
- On the Dashboard, open My workspace. It opens on Your lessons.
- On your lesson's row, open the ⋯ menu and choose Run the lesson.
- Test as before, then Submit and Confirm.
- You land on My submissions. Open the row's ⋮ menu and choose View scores (or Download PDF) to see how you did.
Clicking a lesson's name opens it in the designer, where you can change its settings and decide what gets scored — see Audiometry.
Next steps
- Every other test. The Element Explorer has a card for each element — tympanometry, otoscopy, acoustic reflexes, OAEs, the ABR, speech testing and hearing aids. Each one works like this page — build it and try it — and most can be saved as lessons too. See Element Explorer & the Library.
- Learn the keys. The audiometer can be driven entirely from the keyboard — see Keyboard shortcuts.
- The full audiometer. Taking a submission covers masking, the PTA, and phones and tablets.