uHear is a free hearing screening tool from unitron for people with an iPhone or iPod touch. The site and YouTube video explain it pretty well, and it does what it says it does. There’s a (relatively) quick and dirty pure tone threshold screener, a sound in noise screener, and a functional hearing questionnaire screener.
The results returned on the pure tone screener were similar to results I’ve gotten from screenings conducted with an audiometer (mild loss sloping towards the highs in my left ear, and barely-but-almost-not normal in the right; I blame the bagpipes). I was using foam inserts on those prior screenings, but the results didn’t seem to suffer at all just using the (pretty junky) standard iPhone earbuds.
The speech in noise test is pretty basic/minimal, and returns an Acceptable Noise Level score. It simply says “set the volume of this guy talking where you like it.” Then it adds noise and says, “adjust the noise volume to the loudest you can tolerate it and still understand the speech.” My results came back normal, which doesn’t seem to reflect some of the difficulties I actually have. This seems to be the least thorough instrument in the app.
The functional hearing questionnaire is great. It asks all the right questions, and returns a big ol’ red exclamation point telling you to get an evaluation if you say you’re having any trouble. It’s based on Lopez-Torres’s Hearing-Dependent Daily Activities Scale (and even cites some research in the app itself!), and will probably be the most helpful of the various instruments, and also likely the most used. The main menu lists approximate testing times for each portion, and the 2 minutes listed seems pretty reasonable for the target demographics, much more so than the 6 minutes listed for the pure tone screening.
Some other nice features include the ability to save your screening results from session to session, thereby tracking any changes. I was also thrilled to see the “Locate” tab, which uses the iPhone’s location services to find nearby hearing professionals. However, after multiple attempts, the app has yet to finish “waiting for server results,” so I don’t know whether or how this actually works. Doing a manual search for both my Zip and city/state turned up nothing. This is disappointing. Hopefully they add more care providers as they go.
Try it out. Let me know your impressions.
