Audiology report for a patient

I am having increasing difficulty hearing, especially the human voice in noisy environments, so I had my hearing checked at Northern Virginia Kaiser-Permanente. Here's my reworking of the audiologic evaluation.

Insights

• Hearing acuity falls off fairly steadily and dramatically after about 1000 Hz (around the frequencies of the human voice).
• Hearing above 1500 Hz is below the 'acceptable' cutoff.
• The left ear is less acute than the right.
• There may be a plateau after 5000 Hz.

Original paper report

The report is fairly easy to read but is improved by the above redesign:

• Left and right data difficult to compare side-by-side, especially using the anatomy convention of left on the right side of the page.
• The audiologist's marks are drawn by hand and therefore subject to error (in fact,the test could be completely automated as it requires only the generation of tones and the electronic response of the subject).
• The gridlines obscure insights from the data trends themselves.
• Because they are not aligned, it's difficult to establish a correspondence between the data table above and the plot.
• Too many values shown for decibels.

Technique

The data were copied from the paper report into an R script, which generated a plot with the following features:

1. Results for both ears shown as a R 'matrix plot' with 3 distinguishing designs: R/L markers, line types, and legend; although colors wouldn't be useful in a greyscale copy.
2. Vertical (decibel) axis reversed.
3. 'Acceptable' hearing level shown as a gray line under the data.
4. Hertz axis shows easily read multiples of 250 with intermediate values indicated by vertical lines.
5. L plotted over R as it is a simpler letter, R plotted in Red.
6. The date is shown in an internationally recognizable format.
7. Suggestions: show a 'benchmark' for the population at risk (males, 66 year old, etc?).