Complementary measures for clinical audiological practice to better explain self-reported hearing difficulties: A study using an automated measurement tool in Mexico

Abstract

Accessibility issues, especially in developing countries, have prevented the evaluation of diverse hearing abilities beyond the pure tone audiogram in the general population. PART is a free-access automated auditory measurement tool that can address accessibility issues by providing a wide variety of auditory psychophysical measures in multiple languages on standard relatively low-cost commercial interfaces such as tablets and smart phones. Here, we show that PART can complement traditional audiological tests to better account for people’s hearing complaints. Forty-four adults between 40 and 80 years old were tested in Mexico City with a traditional clinical battery (otoacoustic emissions and pure tone audiogram) and a battery of PART-based central auditory processing and speech-on-speech competition measures. Several measures from the PART battery correlated with self-reported hearing difficulties, and the spatial release from masking task was best able to capture this variance. These preliminary data support the inclusion of a speech-on-speech masking as a complement to traditional clinical measures to better account for the hearing complaints of the public. Furthermore, we show PART-based version of this test can be implemented in a clinical setting in Mexico and produce comparable results to those obtained in developed countries like the United States of America.