Application of a low-cost instrument to identify risk for hearing disorders in a municipal health network.
Monize Menon, Seisse Gabriela Gandolfi Sanches, Alessandra Giannella Samelli
PMID 42561346WHAT IT FOUND
A cheap tablet hearing screen with noise-cancelling headphones matched the standard school sweep test on 99.2% of children, flagging seven where the sweep flagged six.
So few children failed either test that its ability to catch real hearing loss is untested.
Key findings
01Most children passed whichever test they took: 115 (94.3%) passed the tablet screening and 7 (5.7%) failed it, while the sweep screening classified 116 (95.1%) as passed and 6 (4.9%) as failed.
02Compared with the sweep screening, the tablet test was reported as 99.2% accurate, with a sensitivity of 85.7% and a specificity of 100%.
03The statistical coefficient linking the sweep screening result to the tablet result was not significant (p = 0.996) and had an extremely high standard error, which the authors say may indicate collinearity or a near-perfect fit between the two tests.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only 39 of the 122 children had a complete audiological assessment, so the comparison against pure-tone audiometry, the gold standard, rests on a small and self-selected group. Only six children failed the sweep screening and seven failed the tablet screening, so the reported sensitivity rests on a handful of cases and is unstable. Children were recruited by convenience from one municipality and almost all passed, so the sample cannot show how the app behaves where hearing loss is more common. No child was followed up after screening, so the study does not show whether the children flagged as failing actually had hearing loss.
Declared interests
The work was funded by CAPES, a Brazilian government funding agency. The paper declares no other competing interests.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the 85.7% sensitivity as proof the app catches hearing loss. It rests on only seven children failing the tablet screen, and the statistical link between the two screening results was not significant (p = 0.996), which the authors say may reflect a near-perfect fit between the tests rather than a real association.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →