A Browser-Server-Based Tele-audiology System That Supports Multiple Hearing Test Modalities

Telemedicine and Telementoring in Rhinology, Otology, and Laryngology: A Scoping Review

Objective

Telemedicine and telementoring have had a significant boost across all medical and surgical specialties over the last decade and especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this scoping review is to synthesize the current use of telemedicine and telementoring in otorhinolaryngology and head and neck surgery.

Data Sources

PubMed and Cochrane Library.

Review Methods

A scoping review search was conducted, which identified 469 articles. Following full-text screening by 2 researchers, 173 articles were eligible for inclusion and further categorized via relevant subdomains.

Conclusions

Virtual encounters and telementoring are the 2 main applications of telemedicine in otolaryngology. These applications can be classified into 7 subdomains. Different ear, nose, and throat subspecialties utilized certain telemedicine applications more than others; for example, almost all articles on patient engagement tools are rhinology based. Overall, telemedicine is feasible, showing similar concordance when compared with traditional methods; it is also cost-effective, with high patient and provider satisfaction.

Implications for Practice

Telemedicine in otorhinolaryngology has been widely employed during the COVID-19 pandemic and has a huge potential, especially with regard to its distributing quality care to rural areas. However, it is important to note that with current exponential use, it is equally crucial to ensure security and privacy and integrate HIPAA-compliant systems (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) in the big data era. It is expected that many more applications developed during the pandemic are here to stay and will be refined in years to come.

Pediatric Speech Audiometry Web Application for Hearing Detection in the Home Environment

This paper describes the development of the speech audiometry application for pediatric patients in Slovak language and experiences obtained during testing with healthy children, hearing-impaired children, and elderly persons. The first motivation behind the presented work was to reduce the stress and fear of the children, who must undergo postoperative audiometry, but over time, we changed our direction to the simple game-like mobile application for the detection of possible hearing problems of children in the home environment. Conditioned play audiometry principles were adopted to create a speech audiometry application, where children help the virtual robot Thomas assign words to pictures; this can be described as a speech recognition test. Several game scenarios together with the setting condition issues were created, tested, and discussed. First experiences show a positive influence on the children’s mood and motivation.

A Hearing Test Simulator GUI for clinical testing of speech recognition

This paper presents an overview of a useful MATLAB based GUI for speech recognition testing to evaluate the subjects' ability in noisy environments with different SNR values. With this software package, stimuli are presented and the examiner is able to identify which words are correctly perceived. Test data can be collected in various conditions to measure the performance as signal-to-noise ratio or signal processing varies. From the subjects' responses, word recognition rates can be saved by the examiner according to different noise types such as babble, traffic, machinery, and white noise. Additionally, the speech recognition tests are completed through repeated testing cycles. Word recognition scores are saved into the database for later use purpose and analysis. This computer aided simulation makes a reliable and cost effective way to create real environmental conditions for clinical testing. Our MATLAB based GUI addresses the needs of both clinical evaluation and engineering.