Personal experience with the remote check telehealth in cochlear implant users: from COVID-19 emergency to routine service

Abstract

Purpose To critically illustrate the personal experience with using the “Remote Check” application which remotely monitors the hearing rehabilitation level of cochlear implant users at home and further allows clinicians to schedule in-clinic sessions according to the patients’ needs. Methods 12-month prospective study. Eighty adult cochlear implant users (females n = 37, males n = 43; age range 20–77 years) with ≥ 36 months of cochlear implant experience and ≥ 12 months of stable auditory and speech recognition level volunteered for this 12-month long prospective study. For each patient, at the beginning of the study during the in-clinic session to assess the stable aided hearing thresholds and the cochlear implant integrity and patient’s usage, the “Remote Check” assessment baseline values were obtained. “Remote Check” outcomes were collected at different times in the subsequent at-home sessions, to identify the patients that had to reach the Center. Chi-square test has been used for statistical analysis of the comparison of the “Remote Check” outcomes and in-clinic session results. Results “Remote Check” application outcomes demonstrated minimal or no differences between all sessions. The at-home Remote Check application reached the same clinical outcomes as the in-clinic sessions in 79 out 80 of participants (99%) with high statistical significance (p < 0.05). Conclusions “Remote Check” application supported hearing monitoring in cochlear implant users that were not able to attend the in-clinic review during COVID-19 pandemic time. This study demonstrates that the application can be a useful routine tool also for clinical follow-up of cochlear implant users with stable aided hearing.

Systematic review of patient and service outcome measures of remote digital technologies for cochlear implant and hearing aid users

“…The Downs and Black Checklist for Measuring Study Quality was used to investigate individual risk of bias and study quality for the included publications (Downs and Black, 1998). Ten studies were rated as good quality (Ferguson et al, 2016;Cullington et al, 2018;Gomez and Ferguson, 2020;Tao et al, 2020;Venail et al, 2021;Henshaw et al, 2022;Brewer et al, 2023;Coco et al, 2023;Maidment et al, 2023;Malmberg and Hagberg, 2023), seven as poor quality (de Graaff et al, 2016(de Graaff et al, , 2018Maidment et al, 2019;Schepers et al, 2019;Ratanjee-Vanmali et al, 2020;Carner et al, 2023;Çelikgün and Büyükkal, 2023) and the remaining 32 studies were rated as fair quality. The Downs and Black results are available in Supplementary material 4.…”