Remote hearing screening as part of auditory telerehabilitation; a preliminary report

It is well known that implementing a universal hearing screening program is one of the most effective ways for hearing impairment prevention/rehabilitaion. With limited resource on both medical and supporting staff especially in developing countries, concepts such as teleaudiometry increasingly come in to consideration. As a work in progress, this paper discusses the system design, service delivery model, and its key component that is a low-cost software audiometer designed to run on computers with moderate computing capability such as cost-effective netbooks. The audiometer employs a good dynamic-range, low-latency professional USB soundcard as the sound source to overcome hardware limitation found in earlier attempts on software-audiometer. The software developed also has extra features such as acoustic calibration, network accessibility, and video conferencing not found on alternatives in the market. A preliminary trial result from our pilot scheme is reported.