New Mobile App Tests Hearing and Refers to Hearing Care Professionals

By Amanda Farah Cox

A new app has been released in South Africa to test hearing and refer persons with hearing loss to hearing healthcare professionals. hearZA, which was designed by a team at hearScreen that includes Ida Advisory Board member DeWet Swanepoel, is a free mobile app that determines a person’s ability to understand speech in background noise through a digits-in-noise test.

The test takes less than three minutes, and people can use their own headphones. Users will receive a personalized score indicating either normal hearing, a minor hearing loss, or a significant hearing loss.

“We offer every person who take the test the opportunity to be linked with their closest hearing health care providers,” says DeWet. “We have a database of providers nationally which we developed in partnership with the South African Audiology Association and the South African Speech-Language and Hearing Association. If a person requests to be contacted we link the closest hearing health providers to the patients and the professionals log the outcome of the request and appointment on our cloud-based data management tool. To date we have seen that close to 20% of persons who fail the test request to be linked with their closest providers.”

hearZA was designed as a mobile app as it’s the platform with the potential to reach the greatest number of people in South Africa. The app can serve not only as a hearing test but can also be used to remind users to get the hearing checked annually or as a means of outreach who might not have thought to have a hearing test otherwise.

“Access to hearing health care and awareness about hearing loss is a major challenge in countries like South Africa,” DeWet explains. “Whilst there are existing landline-based hearing screening tests internationally, less than 10% of South African households have landline telephones compared to smartphone penetration exceeding 60%. A smartphone platform allows for digital quality test-signals, rich data collection, targeted health messaging, personal hearing profiles, location-based linkage to hearing health providers and social media sharing to get the message out.”

hearZA has had considerable success since its launch, and the attention it has attracted has encouraged the hearScreen team to expand its reach.

“With close to 7000 tests conducted in the first 7 days the hearZA offers numerous opportunities to explore things like targeted health messaging and its effect on trends in follow-up and service uptake,” says DeWet. “We are excited to work with Ida to explore integration of a patient tool like Why Improve My Hearing? to assist decision-making after someone receives their screening result. We are also very eager to use the app not only for detection and linkage to service providers but to increase awareness of hearing health care in the general public and especially younger populations. The personal hearing history feature in the App allows users to monitor their hearing over time and gives us the opportunity to remind users to do their annual test with in-App notifications.”

To learn more and download the app, visit hearScreen.com.