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10/24/2016  |   9:10 AM - 10:10 AM   |  BGPOP Building 402/403/404

Mass School Hearing Health Care

According to the integrated School Health Policy in South Africa, 3.73 million children in South Africa must be screened for hearing each year. Unfortunately there are not enough qualified nurses and audiologists in South Africa to treat that number of children. eMoyo has developed a mobile, boothless, automated audiometer, called the KUDUwave, to help address this need. The device uses state-of-the art software, utilising mHealth and the latest technology in telemedicine. QR-coded permission slips are filled in by parents. The data are digitised through crowdsourcing. On the day that testing will take place, a team of 4 laymen, together with a qualified nurse, will set up 12 audiometers in an empty classroom. Our team uses Fordism industrial engineering principles to optimise testing time, during which we determine air-conduction thresholds at 500Hz, 1000Hz, 2000Hz, and 4000Hz. On average, 144 children are tested per hour. Advanced software algorithms determine when it was noisy at any frequency or if the child lost concentration. Those frequencies are immediately be retested. If the threshold test indicates that screening failed, the test will automatically escalate to perform an air-conduction threshold test at 250Hz and 8000Hz, as well as bone conduction thresholds at 500Hz, 1000Hz, 2000Hz, and 4000Hz. All data are synchronised to a Cloud server where advanced interpretation routines will determine what type of hearing loss the patient has. The parent will receive an SMS with a referral to a doctor if there is a conductive problem, and to an audiologist if any other hearing loss was detected. These industrial engineering processes, software, and audiometry equipment allow us to significantly reduce the costs of a test and to increase the quality of school hearing screening programs, while simultaneously saving parents/guardians unnecessary false referrals or referrals to the incorrect clinician.

• Store and Forward TeleAudiology
• Fordism in audiology
• mHealth in audiology

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Dirk Koekemoer (POC,Primary Presenter,Author), eMoyo, dirk@emoyo.net;
The inventor of the KUDUwave Audiometer, Dirk Koekemoer, has many years of experience in health informatics as a General Practitioner, programmer, innovator and consultant to medical device and software companies. Dirk is extensively involved in the development of medical devices and software tools to automate, speed up and improve the quality of primary health care examinations in a society with too little health care resources. Dr Dirk Koekemoer is earned his MBChB from the University of Pretoria and enrolled at UNISA to obtain his BSc in Computer Science.