The Johor Screening Scheme: Is an Area-Wide Newborn Hearing Screening Possible in Malaysia?

Recently, we proposed a new novelty detection paradigm for the fast detection of hearing thresholds using single sweeps of auditory evoked potentials as efficient approach to newborn hearing screening. Such a method might prevent currently used time consuming averaging procedures which require the state of spontaneous sleep, sedation, or narcosis of the newborns when using such systems in universal newborn hearing screening programs. In this study, we present an evaluation of new feature for such novelty detection schemes, namely the synchronization stability of auditory evoked brainstem activity. It is concluded that the proposed feature following the novelty detection paradigm might be used for the ultra-fast detection of hearing thresholds and is thus ideally suited for the use in universal hearing screening programs.