gms | German Medical Science

Monitoring speech reception and aided audiometric thresholds regularly is widely seen as standard of care. With improved technical options, testing remotely with use of a smartphone became a viable solution. This can help clinics to monitor patients who prefer to perform tests at home or who can't travel to the clinic, and to early diagnose suboptimal hearing performance. On the other hand, remote testing could replace annual follow-up visits for patients who are doing well, which would reduce the work load for the clinic.

A smartphone app with a variety of tests was developed and evaluated in studies with different subject groups (hearing aids, cochlear implants and bimodal patients).

The mean difference in SRT between the smartphone based speech in noise test OlSa and the clinical free field version was 1.6 dB in a study with 11 bimodal users, 2.1 dB in a study with 19 unilateral CI users and 1.6 dB in a study with 13 hearing aid users. These differences could be well explained by the missing influence of room acoustics and microphone characteristics.

Test-retest variability was assessed in a study with 9 cochlear implant subjects who were tested unilaterally. The absolute average deviation between first and second test was 5.3% for single word scores, 4.8% for consonant identification test, 3.4% for phoneme perception test and 0.9 dB for the OlSa. Those differences are well within the known variability of the tests conducted by an audiologist.

Results indicate, that remote testing is feasible with current hearing instrument technologies for monitoring hearing performance.