AudBility: Effectiveness of an online central auditory processing screening program

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 16; no. 8; p. e0256593
• Main Authors: de Carvalho, Nádia Giulian, Amaral, Maria Isabel Ramos do, Colella-Santos, Maria Francisca
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 30-08-2021; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Age; Age groups; Auditory Perception; Auditory processing disorder; Auditory tasks; Behavior; Biology and Life Sciences; Child; Children; Children & youth; Consent; Ear; Efficiency; Evaluation; Females; Guardians; Hearing; Humans; Information processing; Internet; Laboratories; Localization; Males; Mass Screening; Medical screening; Medicine and Health Sciences; Noise; Parents & parenting; Pediatrics; People and Places; ROC Curve; Schools; Sensitivity and Specificity; Social Sciences; Sound localization; Task Performance and Analysis; Temporal resolution; Brazil
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0256593

To contribute to the validation of AudBility, an online central auditory processing screening program, considering the tasks for age between 6 and 8 years-old, from the investigation of sensitivity and specificity, as well as to suggest a minimum central auditory processing (CAP) screening protocol in this age group.
In the first stage of the study, 154 schoolchildren were screened. Children were aged between 6 and 8 years old, native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. The auditory tasks of AudBility analyzed in this study were: sound localization (SL), auditory closure (AC), figure-ground (FG), dichotic digits-binaural integration (DD), temporal resolution (TR) and temporal frequency ordering (TO-F). In the second stage, 112 children attended to CAP assessment in the institution's laboratory. The calculation of efficacy (sensitivity/specificity) was obtained through the construction of the ROC curve for the tests with more than five children altered in the diagnosis.
For the 6-7-year-old age group the accuracy values were: AC (76.9%); FG (61.6%); DD 78.8% for the right ear and 84.4% for the left ear in females and 63.2% for the left ear in males; TR (77.1%) and TO-F (74.4% for the right ear and 82.4% for the left ear). For the 8-year-old age group the values were: FF (76.5%); DD (71.7% for the left ear for females and 77% for the right ear for males); TR (56.5%) and TO-F (54.1% for the right ear and 70% for the left ear).
AudBility showed variations in sensitivity and specificity values between the auditory tasks and age groups, with better effectiveness in schoolchildren between the ages of 6 and 7 than eight-year-olds, except for the FG task. For screening purposes, the application of the protocol involving five tasks for the 6 to 7-year-olds group and with four tasks for the 8-year-olds group is suggested.