A Tablet-Based Mobile Hearing Screening System for Preschoolers: Design and Validation Study (Preprint)

Abstract

Background: Hearing ability is important for children to develop speech and language skills as they grow. After a mandatory newborn hearing screening, group or mass screening of children at later age such as preschoolers are usually practiced. In order for this to be effective and accessible in low-resource countries such as Thailand, novel and innovative enabling tools that make use of pervasive mobile and smartphone technology should be considered. Objective: To develop a cost effective, tablet-based hearing screening system that can perform a rapid minimal speech recognition level test. Methods: An android-based screening application was developed. The screening protocol involved asking the child to pick pictures corresponding to the set of predefined words heard at different sound levels offered in a specifically designed sequence. For the application, the set of words were validated, with their corresponding speech power levels calibrated. 63 Children were screened for their hearing abilities using the application. Results in terms of sensitivity and specificity are compared to those measured using conventional audiometric equipment. Results: For screening purposes, the developed screening system was 100% sensitive (95% CI = 83.18% to 100%) for children with speech reception threshold (SRT) or pure tone average threshold > 25 dBHL, with a specificity 0f 79.44% (95% CI = 70.83% to