engleski

Using Big Data Analytics to Formulate Public Health Policy for Hearing Health

Hearing loss is a huge and increasing global problem ; public health methods are needed to address hearing loss on a large scale within countries. For this purpose, good public health policy decisions are essential in order to develop and implement cost-effective programmes. WHO has recently urged Countries to “improve data on ear diseases and hearing loss, to inform policy decision-making”, and “to formulate evidence-based strategies and policies on ear and hearing care". Innovative, rapid, comprehensive measures will be needed to do this. EVOTION, the project described here, is using big data analytics in an integrated platform to gather large amounts of retrospective and real-time data from hearing aid users and to analyse it to make public health policy recommendations through the use of model-based computer algorithms. The real- time data will be collected from subjects’ smart hearing aid(s) and biosensors ; and sent through smart phones to the platform. Until now, public health policy decisions have been determined using retrospective epidemiological and clinical data, guidelines, expertise of policy makers, and evidence from searches of randomised controlled trials. EVOTION will enable public health policy decisions to be made more rapidly, appropriately and accurately, based on evidence that is continually obtained and assessed from analysis of static clinical and dynamic hearing aid usage, and physiological and environmental data of hearing aid users. For this, EVOTION is developing a configurable computing platform integrating big data analytics and decision support capabilities. EVOTION is a consortium funded under the EU Horizon 2020 programme. It is the first ever project to use big data analytics and real-time data for public health policy formulation in the field of hearing loss. EVOTION would be useful for all countries that are involved in the global enterprise to reduce the massive burden of hearing loss. 1. To recognise that Public Health methods are needed in policy-making to address the massive global burden of hearing loss. 2. To understand how retrospective and real-time data will be collected from static and dynamic sources and utilised by the EVOTION platform. 3. To understand how Big Data Analytics may be used to formulate Public Health Policy for Hearing Health, as being developed by the EVOTION project.

Public health methods, public health policy, evidence-based strategies, computing platform

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