{"id":5987,"date":"2019-10-17T10:11:21","date_gmt":"2019-10-17T07:11:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/africasustainabilitymatters.com\/?p=5987"},"modified":"2026-01-11T05:30:37","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T05:30:37","slug":"we-used-smartphones-to-screen-young-children-for-vision-and-hearing-loss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/2019\/10\/17\/we-used-smartphones-to-screen-young-children-for-vision-and-hearing-loss\/","title":{"rendered":"We Used Smartphones To Screen Young Children For Vision And Hearing Loss"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By\nDe Wet Swanepoel<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Healthy hearing and vision in early childhood are\nthe foundation for success at school. Hearing and vision difficulties are\nthe most\ncommon developmental disabilities<\/a> in children younger than 5 years,\nwith more than 40 million affected globally. But more than 90% of children with\nhearing or vision loss live in low and middle-income countries where services\nto detect problems early are unavailable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Called invisible disabilities hearing and vision\nloss cannot be identified without conducting a test. These tests, especially\nfor hearing, have traditionally needed expensive equipment and trained health\nprofessionals such as audiologists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without systematic screening programmes these losses\ngo undetected until children reach school age where they often have a\ndevastating impact on development, academic outcomes, and socio-emotional\nwell-being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the last six years, I\u2019ve been working with\ncolleagues around the world to develop, implement and evaluate a number of\nhearing care models that can be delivered in communities using smartphone\ntechnologies and facilitated by minimally trained people. We\u2019ve been targeting\npoor communities in particular.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The minimally trained people that we worked with\nincluded lay community members, community health workers, community care\nworkers, and even teachers. They provided hearing-related services such as\nawareness programs, hearing screening, referral, follow-up and diagnostics in\nthe children\u2019s homes, preschools, schools and in clinics. In 2016, we\nintroduced vision screening in a pilot project demonstrating the feasibility\nand value of combined\nscreening<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our most recent implementation\nstudy<\/a> evaluates a service-delivery screening project in low-income\ncommunities by community members using mobile health (mHealth) technologies.\nThe project has been run in the Western Cape in South Africa. This is the first\nreport in the world of combined hearing and vision screening for young\nchildren.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our findings show that a mobile health supported\nservice-delivery system can dramatically increase access to hearing and vision\nservices for preschool children in poor communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nresearch<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between September 2017 and December 2018 we\nintroduced and implemented a screening programme in preschools in Khayelitsha\nand Mitchells Plain in Cape Town. Both are poor communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We appointed unemployed community members and trained\nthem as lay health workers to provide both hearing and vision screening at\npreschool centres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We gave the community health workers smartphones with pre-installed applications. The mobile health technology used was provided by the\u00a0, a digital health company that was started from our work at the University of Pretoria. The\u00a0\u00a0app provided a quick and reliable hearing check using automated protocols and user-friendly designs. Vision was checked using theapp provided by the UK-based partner\u00a0Peek Vision<\/a>. Peek vision has been used previously for population-based testing in countries like\u00a0Kenya<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By De Wet Swanepoel Healthy hearing and vision in early childhood are the foundation for success at school. Hearing and vision difficulties are the most common developmental disabilities in children younger than…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":5988,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}