Evolution of audiometry: Clinical testing of a new tablet audiometer

A clinical study was conducted to determine the accuracy of audiometric thresholds measured using tablet audiometry. The results were compared to those obtained with accepted conventional conditioned play audiometry (CPA). The study was conducted on a population of 85 patients with normal or abnormal hearing, aged 3-16, at the Audiology Clinic at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario. All participants completed two audiometric evaluations, one with the tablet audiometer and one with conventional CPA and the order of the test was determined at random. 55 subjects were identified by the conventional CPA test to have normal hearing. Of these, 52 were correctly identified with tablet audiometry, the remaining 3 children scoring slightly outside the parameters defined for normal hearing. For patients who had separate left-right ear assessments, a repeated measures model for the threshold in each ear at each frequency was fitted using linear mixed effects modeling.