TabSINT: open-source mobile software for distributed studies of hearing

Abstract

Objective: The recent emphasis on outcomes-based medical research has motivated a need for technology that allows researchers and clinicians to reach a larger and more diverse subject population for recruitment and testing.

Design: This article reports on open-source mobile software (TabSINT) that enables researchers to administer customised hearing tests and questionnaires on tablets located across multiple sites. Researchers create and modify test protocols using text-based templates and deploy it to the tablets via a cloud-based repository or USB-computer connection. Results are exported locally to the tablet SD card and can also be automatically posted to a cloud-based database.

Results: Between 2014 and 2019, TabSINT collected 25,000+ test results using more than 200+ unique test protocols for researchers located worldwide.

Conclusions: TabSINT is a powerful software system with the potential to greatly enhance research across multiple disciplines by enabling access to subject cohorts in remote and disparate locations. Released open-source, this software is available to researchers across the world to use and adapt to their specific needs. Researchers with engineering resources can contribute to the repository to extend the capability and robustness of this software.

Keywords:

• Open-source software
• mobile applications
• medical information systems
• mobile learning
• biomedical informatics
• telemedicine

Acknowledgments

In particular, we gratefully acknowledge the support and contributions of the Audiology and Speech Centre at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre and the Department of Defence Hearing Centre of Excellence in the development and extensive testing of this software.

We would like to thank Hector Galloza (2gari), Rob Chambers (Creare), Brendan Flynn (Creare) Jaclyn Schurman (University of Maryland), and the many other engineers and audiologists at Creare and Walter Reed for their support in the development of this system.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the U.S. Army Medical Research Materiel Command and the Army Public Health Command under SBIR Phase III Awards #W81XWH-13-C-0194, #W81XWH-16-C-0160, and #W81XWH-17-C-0218 to Creare LLC.