Do uHear? Validation of uHear App for Preliminary Screening of Hearing Ability in Soundscape Studies

TL;DR

This study evaluates the uHear app as a cost-effective, automated screening tool for hearing ability in soundscape research, showing high accuracy compared to traditional audiometry in a sample of 163 participants.

Contribution

The paper validates the uHear app as an affordable, reliable alternative to professional audiometry for preliminary hearing screening in soundscape studies.

Findings

uHear achieved 98.04% precision using WHO grading.

Precision increased to 98.69% when all frequencies were considered.

uHear is a cost-effective, automated screening method for normal hearing.

Abstract

Studies involving soundscape perception often exclude participants with hearing loss to prevent impaired perception from affecting experimental results. Participants are typically screened with pure tone audiometry, the "gold standard" for identifying and quantifying hearing loss at specific frequencies, and excluded if a study-dependent threshold is not met. However, procuring professional audiometric equipment for soundscape studies may be cost-ineffective, and manually performing audiometric tests is labour-intensive. Moreover, testing requirements for soundscape studies may not require sensitivities and specificities as high as that in a medical diagnosis setting. Hence, in this study, we investigate the effectiveness of the uHear app, an iOS application, as an affordable and automatic alternative to a conventional audiometer in screening participants for hearing loss for the purpose of soundscape studies or listening tests in general. Based on audiometric comparisons with the audiometer of 163 participants, the uHear app was found to have high precision (98.04%) when using the World Health Organization (WHO) grading scheme for assessing normal hearing. Precision is further improved (98.69%) when all frequencies assessed with the uHear app is considered in the grading, which lends further support to this cost-effective, automated alternative to screen for normal hearing.