Calibration and initial validation of a low-cost computer-based screening audiometer coupled to consumer insert phone-earmuff combination for boothless audiometry

Abstract

Objective

To undertake calibration and preliminary validation of a custom-designed computer-based screening audiometer connected to consumer insert phone-earmuff combination for adult pure tone audiometry.

Design

Part 1 involved electroacoustic measurement and biological calibration of a laptop-earphone pair used for the computer-based audiometry (CBA). Part 2 compared CBA thresholds obtained without a sound booth with those measured using the gold-standard clinical audiometry.

Study sample

17 young normal-hearing volunteers (Part 1) and 43 normal and hearing loss subjects (Part 2) recruited from an audiology clinic via convenience sampling.

Results

The transducer-device combination produced outputs suitable for measuring thresholds down to 0 dB HL. Threshold pairs obtained from the CBA and clinical audiometry were highly correlated (Spearman’s correlation coefficient, ρ = 0.92, p < 0.0001) and had a good degree of agreement (mean difference of −1.06 ± 7.63 dB). Also, the CBA showed about 90% sensitivity and 80% specificity for detecting hearing loss based on low (0.5, 1, 2 kHz) and high frequency (4, 8 kHz) pure tone averages of >25 dB HL.

Conclusions

The use of a computer-based audiometer application with consumer insert phone-earmuff combination can offer a cost-effective solution for boothless screening audiometry.

Keywords:

• Insert phones
• low-cost hearing screening
• hearing loss
• pure tone audiometry
• computer-based hearing test

Acknowledgment

The authors thank Dr. Hong Yet Hoi for his help in the study design, Prof. Zukiflee Abu Bakar and the staff of the audiology clinic at the University of Malaya Medical Center for aiding the recruitment and testing of the patients. The electroacoustical measurements were obtained with the help of Asyiqin Rasidi and data provided in supplementary content 3 is also available in her Ph.D. thesis.

Ethics approval

Ethics approval for all experiments involving human subjects was obtained from University of Malaya Medical Centre-Medical Research Ethic Committee (UMMC-MREC, ID NO: 20181016-6756) and all volunteers provided informed consent.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Malaya Faculty Research Grant (GPF005A-2020).