Hearing impairment is considered as a silent disability across the world. Unaddressed hearing loss impacts communication and speech, cognition, social isolation, society, economy, education and employment. Therefore, Hearing screening for newborns has become a common practice in many high-income countries. In Low- and middle-income country like India, stake holders are making possible efforts to set up a newborn hearing screening program. Mobile health solutions have been explored in hearing health care services to reduce device costs, decentralize health care, and address the device related gaps that exist in early identification of childhood hearing loss.

Recently we developed (funded by DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance), SRESHT – a low cost mHealth based hearing screening device to screen for disabling hearing losses (>40% of hearing loss) in children below 6 years of age in rural districts of Tamil nadu.

Our proposed project through the current grant aims to scale up the SRESHT device to various states of India by developing and validating hearing screening module using ‘Speech/ speech spectrum based stimuli’ in noise in several Indian languages (Telugu, Hindi, Kannada). These modules will have language independent stimuli for children below 3 years of age and language dependent modules for children between 3 and 6 years of age. This project also aims to screen lower degrees of hearing loss (mild degree) in children using SRESHT device’s newly developed hearing screening module. We believe this will support implementation of community level early identification of childhood hearing screening thorugh both public sector and NGOs in India.