Background
The use of smart phone technology and applications (apps) are increasingly being used within the medical arena offering improvement in clinical practice and developing the way that we deliver healthcare to our patients.
Many hearing screening apps have been developed over the last 10 years to aid with screening patients with hearing concerns. The hearX Group have developed hearTest™ which is the mobile hearing test app that we propose to use within this study. hearTest™ is a CE marked app that is approved for testing air conduction thresholds. Within their adult sample, 94.4% of thresholds obtained through smartphone audiometry were within 10dB of conventional audiometry thresholds. Furthermore; mean test durations for hearX (6.75-min, SD=1.5) and conventional audiometry (6.65-min, SD=2.5) were not significantly different.
Hearing loss itself produces significant socioeconomic consequences for patients as well as effecting quality of life. More recently hearing loss has been recognized as an independent risk factor for dementia. Despite this, current NICE guidelines on the diagnosis of dementia fail to adequately recognize hearing as a significant risk factor. The current NICE pathway only recommends formal audiology in patients presenting with a subjective hearing loss. We feel that all patients regardless of symptoms should be offered a hearing screen and the hearTest™ app offers a cost-effective alternative to a formal pure tone audiogram (PTA).
Our aim is to demonstrate the need for hearing screening in these patients to identify unrecognized hearing loss which may aid in the patients quality of life. We propose the use of a screening tool to improve the patients pathway from referral through to audiology services.
Impact of ENT UK Foundation funding
Assist in securing the requirement equipment and roll out of this exploratory study.
Current Status
Protocol submitted for peer review and under review from R&D department with aim to imminently submit for ethical approval.
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