Abstract
The main objective of this project was to develop a cost effective, tablet-based hearing screening system that can perform a rapid minimal speech recognition level test. 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 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 86.01%). The time taken for screening of each child was less than 2 minutes on average, compared to 12 minutes required in normal procedure. Also, to explore other options that could suit a variety of resource settings, the secondary objective was to implement and evaluate standard pure tone audiometric measurement and tele-audiometry functions on the tablet-based system. It was found that, with additional hardware to increase the dynamic range, function-wise both could successfully be realized. However, due to calibration difficulties especially for the bone-conduction audiometry, accuracies were found to be less than those measured with standard audiometric equipment. Still, the results were encouraging enough to warrant further research and development on this.
