Conception and realization of a mobile application to support the hearing loss by means of EMA measurements

Hearing loss or Hearing impairment is a burden that many people are struggling with. Worldwide approximately 466 million people suffer from hearing loss, which represents over 5% of the world?s population. According to the Global Burden Disease Study of the World Health Organization (WHO), hearing loss is the fifth common disorder in patients reducing the quality of life. Hearing impairment may occur, due to various causes, such as ear infection, a very noisy environment or simply because of ageing. On top of the accumulating frustration of constantly missing words and sounds, there is the added embarrassment or denial of misunderstanding conversations, leading to gradual social isolation, which means hearing loss has a seriously unpleasant effect on the quality and pleasure of life. As Helen Keller said, Blindness separates people from things, deafness separates people from people. There are numerous therapies available that can completely or partially repair the hearing loss. However, in some cases, the therapies may be unsuccessful and those with disturbed hearing may stay not treated. In Order to support the development of new therapies for impaired patients, the Ulm university developed a medical mobile application for this purpose. The medical application is called Track Your Hearing (TYH) and it performs subjective self-assessments by means of questionnaires, whereby the psychological sensation and the surrounding sound are important. According to a 2019 study a self-reported questionnaire-based approach may be used for the assessment of hearing loss especially when audiometry is not feasible. TYH app helps the patients to track their hearing so they can find patterns and figure out how their hearing loss is associated with their daily activities.