Hearing tests are just child’s play: the sound scouts game for children entering school

Abstract

Objective: To create a hearing test useable without the involvement of a clinician or calibrated equipment, suitable for children aged 5 or older. Design: The tablet-based app (Sound Scouts) includes tests of speech in quiet, speech in noise and tones in noise, all embedded in game designed to maintain attention. Data were collected to intelligibility-equalize the stimuli, establish normative performance, and evaluate the sensitivity with which Sound Scouts detected known hearing problems and identified their type. Study sample: Participants were children from age 5 to 14 (394 with normal hearing, 97 with previously identified hearing loss) and 50 adults with normal hearing. Results: With pass-fail criteria set such that 98% of children with normal hearing passed Sound Scouts, 85% of children with hearing loss failed Sound Scouts (after exclusion of children in either group who received an inconclusive result or had incomplete results). No child with four-frequency average hearing thresholds of 30 dB HL or greater in their poorer ear passed Sound Scouts. Hearing loss type was correctly identified in only two-thirds of those cases where the algorithm attempted to identify a single type of loss. Conclusions: Sound Scouts has specificity and sensitivity sufficiently high to provide hearing screening around the time children typically enter school.

Key Words:

• Pediatric
• tele-audiology/tele-health
• speech perception
• computer based

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Taegan Young, Sanna Hou, Kiri Mealings, Patricia Van Buynder, Lauren Burns, Kim Ter Horst, and Lyndal Carter for providing audiological data against which to cross-check Sound Scouts results, and for supervision of the collection of normative data.

Portions of this paper were presented at the International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology, October 2015, San Francisco, and at the Audiology Australia Conference, May 2016, Melbourne.

Harvey Dillon acknowledges the financial support of the NIHR Manchester Biomedical Research Centre and the Australian Department of Health.

Declaration of interest: Sound Scouts Pty Ltd and the National Acoustic Laboratories receive revenue when Sound Scouts is downloaded and used.