VALIDITY ASSESSMENTS OF COMPUTERIZED AUDIOMETRY A CASE INVOLVING THE KUDUwave5000 AUDIOMETER AND THE ACEScreening DEVICE

ABSTRACT

Background: Technological progress in the construction of personal computers, has offered the possibility of conducting hearing tests with a computer program. Computerized audiometers can be designed for manual, automatic and self-administered hearing testing.

Aim: The study investigated the validity of the ACEScreening device as a self-administered hearing screening test and the KUDUWave5000 audiometer as an automated diagnostic audiometer.

Methods: The population for this study consisted of patients reporting to the audiology clinic in Korle Bu Teaching Hospital for hearing assessment and students of the College of Health Science, University of Ghana. Hundred subjects constituted the sample size. Subjects were selected based on an inclusion and exclusion criteria. The study was conducted at the audiology clinic in Korle Bu Teaching Hospital. Two laboratories with varying ambient noise were utilized. The first laboratory was a sound-treated booth (ambient noise < 40 dB). The second laboratory was a quiet office with an average ambient noise of 47.2 dB. The design employed for this study was a within subject experimental group design. Thus, each participant recruited into the study was tested with three audiometric equipments (a KUDUwave5000 audiometer in a quiet office, an ACEScreening device in a quiet office and a GSI 17 audiometer in a sound treated booth).

Results: There was a significant strong positive correlation between the unmasked pure tone air-conduction thresholds obtained by the KUDUWave5000 Audiometer in a quiet office and the same experiment obtained with the GSI 17 audiometer in a sound-treated booth across the frequencies of 250, 500, 1000, 2000 and 8000 Hz for right and left ears.

The mean differences revealed that the mean air-conduction hearing threshold difference between the GSI 17 audiometer and the KUDUwave5000 audiometer across each tested frequency for both right and left ears was less than 5dB.

There was a significant moderate to strong positive correlation between the unmasked pure tone air-conduction thresholds obtained with the ACEScreening device in a quiet office and the same experiment obtained with the GSI 17 audiometer in a sound-treated booth across the frequencies of 250, 500, 1000, 2000 and 8000 Hz for right and left ears. The mean air-conduction hearing threshold differences between the GSI 17 audiometer and the ACEScreening device was less than 17 dB at 250 and 500 Hz and less than 10dB at 1000, 2000, 4000 and 8000 Hz.

Conclusion: It is tenable that the ACEScreening device and the KUDUWave5000 can be used to conduct unmasked pure tone air conduction hearing test in a quiet office where the ambient noise is a little higher than the maximum permissible ambient noise levels for audiometric test environment.