VALIDATION OF A BEHAVIOURAL, SPEECH SPECTRUM/SPEECH BASED mHEALTH HEARING SCREENER FOR CHILDREN

An affordable mHealth-based subjective hearing screener (SRESHT) for children was developed to support contextualized hearing screening for developing countries. The screener was developed with calibrated commercial headphones and speakers at 60 dB HL with the target goal of identifying children with moderately severe or above degrees of disability (WH0, 2019). The hearing screener includes Behavioral Observation Audiometry (BOA) based screening module (0 to 1 year of age), Speech Spectrum Awareness Task (SSAT) module (1 to 3 years of age), Speech Recognition Task (SRT) module (3 to 6 years of age) and High Risk register (HRR) and Parental Questionnaire (PQ) module (0 to 6 years). The study identified optimal screening modules for detecting hearing loss = 60 dB HL for 0-1 year of age, 1 to 3 years of age and 3 to 6 years of age separately. For infants aged 0-1 year, the combined BOA+HRR module was found to be most suitable (SEN = 86%, SPE = 91%, ACU = 90%). In children aged 1-3 years, SSAT module was found to be suitable (SEN = 98%, SPE = 85%, ACU = 91.2%. For the 3-6 years age group, SRT was found suitable (SEN =95%, SPE = 89%, ACU = 91.43%). When test-based screening methods are not feasible, standalone HRR (0-1 year) and PQ (3-6 years) modules remain viable alternatives, meeting the 80% sensitivity and specificity benchmarks to screen for > = 60dBHL.