Smartphone-Based Hearing Screening at Primary Health Care Clinics

Objective: To evaluate the performance of smartphone-based hearing screening with the hearScreen™ application in terms of sensitivity, specificity, referral rates, and time efficiency at two primary health care clinics. Design: Nonprobability purposive sampling was used at both clinics. A total of 1236 participants (mean age: 37.8 ± SD 17.9 and range 3 to 97 years; 71.3% female) were included in the final analysis. Participants were screened using the hearScreen™ application following a two-step screening protocol and diagnostic pure-tone audiometry to confirm hearing status. Results: Sensitivity and specificity for smartphone screening was 81.7 and 83.1%, respectively, with a positive and negative predictive value of 87.6 and 75.6%, respectively. Sex [χ2(1, N = 126) = 0.304, p > 0.05] and race [χ2(1, N = 126) = 0.169, p > 0.05)] had no significant effect on screening outcome for children while for adults age (p

http://ift.tt/2ms5HWZ