Pediatric Speech Audiometry Web Application for Hearing Detection in the Home Environment

Abstract

This paper describes the development of the speech audiometry application for pediatric patients in Slovak language and experiences obtained during testing with healthy children, hearing-impaired children, and elderly persons. The first motivation behind the presented work was to reduce the stress and fear of the children, who must undergo postoperative audiometry, but over time, we changed our direction to the simple game-like mobile application for the detection of possible hearing problems of children in the home environment. Conditioned play audiometry principles were adopted to create a speech audiometry application, where children help the virtual robot Thomas assign words to pictures; this can be described as a speech recognition test. Several game scenarios together with the setting condition issues were created, tested, and discussed. First experiences show a positive influence on the children’s mood and motivation.