Disabling hearing loss, according to the World Health Organization, affects 466 million people in the world and is predicted to rise to 900 million by 2050, unless action is taken. It is estimated that age-related and other hearing loss is the 4th most prevalent condition and 3rd leading cause of years lived with disability (YLD) in 2016.
Hearing loss may have a detrimental impact on life quality, and has huge socioeconomic costs, as it increases the risk of cognitive decline, mental illness and depression, and leads to social isolation, unemployment/early retirement and work discrimination. Robust public health methods are required to address hearing loss on a large scale throughout the world. Sound, evidence-based public health policy decisions are essential to develop and implement effective and cost-effective programmes.
Currently, the main intervention for hearing loss is the provision of hearing aids. However, despite accumulating evidence that hearing aids provide considerable benefits in many situations and indications that provision of hearing aids slows down cognitive decline, the treatment is considered costly. Thus, there is a need for increased integration of scientific evidence and policy making within this area of hearing health care.
The overall objective of EVOTION is the development of an integrated platform as shown in Figure 1, with components that enable public health policy makers to prepare policy proposals, simulate impact of policy proposals, and monitor implemented policies within the area of public hearing health policies. The objectives also include the development of decision and simulation models, a high-level language and transformation tool for specifying and implementing health policy decision making models on the platform, components for secure collection and processing of data, and finally to carry out technical, clinical, and policy evaluations of the platform.
The size and diversity of the collected data is significant, as it contains more than 60 Gb data, more than 200 parameters that can be utilized in the context of Workflow or Policy definition. The data collected through EVOTION activities includes personal health records via the clinical study and specific applications, real time HA-device data and audiometry mobile test data. The PHPDM Model Specification tool as an integrated part of the EVOTION platform that utilises platform’s underneath components to support the “evidence-informed health policymaking”, by allowing policy makers to back/evaluate their policy actions by concrete evidences derived from the collected data.
