Feasibility of remote assessment of the binaural intelligibility level difference in school-age children

This work evaluated the feasibility and reliability of remotely assessing masked speech recognition and the binaural intelligibility level difference (BILD) in children. Participants were 28 children (6–17 years) and 11 adults (22–45 years) with self-reported normal hearing. A three-alternative forced-choice word recognition task was completed using participants' personal hardware (headphones and computer) and custom software that uploaded results to a central database. Results demonstrate that assessment of masked speech recognition and the BILD is feasible and generally reliable in a remote setting. Variability of results across individuals would likely have been reduced by distributing or specifying appropriate headphones.