Sustainable Hearing Healthcare: IPAD Point-of-Care Diagnostic Audiometry

In 2008 the WHO estimated that 664 million people have hearing impairment and that 80% of them live in low and middle income countries. Only 20% of the world's population has access to hearing testing and only 1 in 40 will be fitted with a hearing aid. In all of Africa there are only 160 audiologists for over 1 billion people. Demand for care vastly exceeds supply of equipment and professionals. Our idea is to develop a mobile point of care diagnostic tool that is so simple a child can test their own hearing. The test is fun, accurate and inexpensive. It can be used to connect people within a country or across the world to improve care. Our idea is to specially calibrate ipads or cell phones as audiometers. We use clinical audiometric headphones to administer valid tests. We have also developed an innovative game which puts the power to test accurately in the hands of the user. The user plays the game and based on how they play we obtain hearing thresholds.