Abstract:The auditory brainstem response (ABR) is an objective method to detect hearing loss. Generally, the ABR induced by click is considered as the gold standard. However, the click-induced ABR is mainly used to assess high-frequency hearing due to the delayed characteristics of human cochlear basilar membrane. In order to compensate for the limitation of the ABR induced by click, a swept-tone stimulus that adjusts the occurrence time of different frequency components was proposed and used to evoke the ABR in this study. The swept-tone evoked ABR was compared with the click evoked ABR at different test levels and different stimulus rates. The experimental results show that the waveform morphology of the swept-tone ABR is better than that of the click ABR. In addition, the swept-tone ABR and the click ABR after different sweeps were also calculated under a different number of sweeps, and the results show that the swept-tone ABR could save recording time compared to the click ABR. These results suggest that the proposed swept-tone ABR could be more sensitive than the commonly used click ABR in the detection of hearing loss.