The potential of teleaudiology in remote areas as the Arctic: a scoping review of treatment and rehabilitation in remote and low-resource settings

Abstract

Hearing disability constitutes a major health care issue especially among indigenous populations and in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). The authors are engaged in organising audiological services in Greenland, where the geographical challenges highlight the potential of tele-audiology. The search strategy was created in the PubMed database combining keywords and MeSH Terms with “OR” in each domain: “Hearing” and “Telemedicine” and then combined using “AND”. Telerehabilitation was defined as: Rehabilitation of patients with hearing loss enabled by one or more consultations with a specialist over a remote connection. The search was reproduced in Cochrane. The final search resulted in a total of 2,273 articles. After screening, 32 articles were reviewed. The included studies cover a broad variety of study designs, age groups, and countries. All included studies were analysed and summarised according to themes of relevance to an arctic setting. The review concludes that the technological development in tele-audiology has come far. Importantly, none of the studies reviewed provided clear evidence that tele-audiology delivers an inferior service, though further high-quality research is needed to confirm this. However, the evidence level in the studies was generally low. The usability of tele-audiology in cross-cultural settings and LMICstill need further investigation.

Keywords

• Greenland
• arctic medicine
• indigenous populations
• telemedicine
• audiology
• rehabilitation