Web-Based Hearing Screening Test

How reliable are online speech intelligibility studies with known listener cohorts?

Although the use of nontraditional settings for speech perception experiments is growing, there have been few controlled comparisons of online and laboratory modalities in the context of speech intelligibility. The current study compares outcomes from three web-based replications of recent laboratory studies involving distorted, masked, filtered, and enhanced speech, amounting to 40 separate conditions. Rather than relying on unrestricted crowdsourcing, this study made use of participants from the population that would normally volunteer to take part physically in laboratory experiments. In sentence transcription tasks, the web cohort produced intelligibility scores 3-6 percentage points lower than their laboratory counterparts, and test modality interacted with experimental condition. These disparities and interactions largely disappeared after the exclusion of those web listeners who self-reported the use of low quality headphones, and the remaining listener cohort was also able to replicate key outcomes of each of the three laboratory studies. The laboratory and web modalities produced similar measures of experimental efficiency based on listener variability, response errors, and outlier counts. These findings suggest that the combination of known listener cohorts and moderate headphone quality provides a feasible alternative to traditional laboratory intelligibility studies.

A systematic review of the use of telehealth in speech, language and hearing sciences

Introduction

We conducted a systematic literature review to investigate the domain of speech-language and hearing sciences (SLHS) in telehealth.

Methods

The databases used for the literature search were Web of Knowledge, Pubmed, Scopus, Embase and Scielo. The inclusion criteria consisted of papers published up to August 2014. Papers without peer-review evaluation, and those without abstracts or available full texts were excluded.

Results

A total of 103 papers were selected. The selected studies have focused primarily on hearing (32.1%), followed by speech (19.4%), language (16.5%), voice (8.7%), swallowing (5.8%), multiple areas (13.6%) and others (3.9%). The majority of the studies focused on assessment (36.9%) or intervention (36.9%). The use of telehealth in SLHS has been increasing in many countries, especially in the last 5 years. The country with the largest number of published studies was the United States of America (32.03%), followed by Australia (29.12%). The remaining studies were distributed in lower numbers among other countries.

Discussion

The advancement of information and communication technologies provides more favourable conditions for providing distance care in several areas. Most of studies concluded that the telehealth procedure had advantages over the non-telehealth alternative approach (85.5%); however, 13.6% reported that it was unclear whether the telehealth procedure had advantages. Some barriers still need to be overcome, such as technology, training, regulation, acceptance and recognition of the benefits of this practice by the public and professionals. The need for speech-language pathologists and audiologists to adapt to this new health care modality is evident.

Teleaudiometry as a screening method in school children

OBJECTIVE

To compare the efficacy and feasibility of teleaudiometry with that of sweep audiometry in elementary school children, using pure-tone audiometry as the gold standard.

METHODS

A total of 243 students with a mean age of 8.3 years participated in the study. Of these, 118 were boys, and 125 were girls. The following procedures were performed: teleaudiometry screening with software that evaluates hearing at frequencies of 1,000, 2000 and 4000 Hz at 25 dBHL; sweep audiometry screening in an acoustic booth (20 dBHL at the same frequencies); pure-tone audiometry thresholds in an acoustic booth (frequencies of 500, 1000, 2000 and 4000 Hz); and acoustic immittance measurements.

RESULTS

The diagnostic capacities of the teleaudiometry/sweep audiometry screening methods were as follows: sensitivity  ϝ  58%/65%; specificity  ϝ  86%/99%; positive predictive value  ϝ  51%/91%; negative predictive value  ϝ  89%/92%; and accuracy  ϝ  81%/92%. Teleaudiometry and sweep audiometry showed moderate agreement. Furthermore, the use of these methods in series with immittance testing improved the specificity, whereas parallel testing improved the sensitivity.

CONCLUSION

Teleaudiometry was found to be reliable and feasible for screening hearing in school children. Moreover, teleaudiometry is the preferred method for remote areas where specialized personnel and specific equipment are not available, and its use may reduce the costs of hearing screening programs.