Evaluating the Service Quality of Mobile Health Versus Clinic Based Intervention in Hearing Healthcare. A Comparative Study

• Main Authors: Florian Ross, Atilla Wohllebe
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: International Association of Online Engineering (IAOE) 2021-05-01
• Series: International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies
• Subjects: hearing healthcare; mobile health; service quality; tele-medicine
• Online Access: https://online-journals.org/index.php/i-jim/article/view/21725

Hearing Healthcare is in midst of a paradigm shift and the use of mobile health technologies plays therefore a major role. Through the Bluetooth connectivity between the hearing aids and the smartphone with an accompanying app, the HCP can remotely access hearing aid settings during an online video session. In this study, 30 subjects were divided into a tele-audiology intervention and a clinic-based control group and followed up after an initial fitting for four weeks. At the beginning, structured interviews were used to determine the expectations on the service quality of a Hearing Aid Company, and these were compared with the actual perceived performances at the end of the study using the SERVQUAL model. Various advantages and disadvantages of both forms of intervention were identified. It could be concluded that a combination of both variants ensures the greatest possible perception of service quality.