Friday, March 29, 2024

We Used Smartphones To Screen Young Children For Vision And Hearing Loss

Share

By De Wet Swanepoel

Healthy hearing and vision in early childhood are the foundation for success at school. Hearing and vision difficulties are the most common developmental disabilities in children younger than 5 years, with more than 40 million affected globally. But more than 90% of children with hearing or vision loss live in low and middle-income countries where services to detect problems early are unavailable.

Called invisible disabilities hearing and vision loss cannot be identified without conducting a test. These tests, especially for hearing, have traditionally needed expensive equipment and trained health professionals such as audiologists.

Without systematic screening programmes these losses go undetected until children reach school age where they often have a devastating impact on development, academic outcomes, and socio-emotional well-being.

Over the last six years, I’ve been working with colleagues around the world to develop, implement and evaluate a number of hearing care models that can be delivered in communities using smartphone technologies and facilitated by minimally trained people. We’ve been targeting poor communities in particular.

The minimally trained people that we worked with included lay community members, community health workers, community care workers, and even teachers. They provided hearing-related services such as awareness programs, hearing screening, referral, follow-up and diagnostics in the children’s homes, preschools, schools and in clinics. In 2016, we introduced vision screening in a pilot project demonstrating the feasibility and value of combined screening.

Our most recent implementation study evaluates a service-delivery screening project in low-income communities by community members using mobile health (mHealth) technologies. The project has been run in the Western Cape in South Africa. This is the first report in the world of combined hearing and vision screening for young children.

Our findings show that a mobile health supported service-delivery system can dramatically increase access to hearing and vision services for preschool children in poor communities.

The research

Between September 2017 and December 2018 we introduced and implemented a screening programme in preschools in Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain in Cape Town. Both are poor communities.

We appointed unemployed community members and trained them as lay health workers to provide both hearing and vision screening at preschool centres.

We gave the community health workers smartphones with pre-installed applications. The mobile health technology used was provided by the hearX Group, a digital health company that was started from our work at the University of Pretoria. The hearScreen app provided a quick and reliable hearing check using automated protocols and user-friendly designs. Vision was checked using the Peek Acuity app provided by the UK-based partner Peek Vision. Peek vision has been used previously for population-based testing in countries like Kenya.

Read more…

Read more

Related News