Feasibility Assessment of an Intelligent Agent to Assist Preserving Healthy Hearing.

Hearing loss is a rising health concern. The World Health Organization estimates that over 1.5 billion people worldwide are currently experiencing hearing loss. This estimate is projected to rise to 2.5 billion by 2050. Hearing loss is often linked with other health conditions, such as dementia, exacerbating its impact. Chronic hearing loss often worsens over time. Early intervention and effective management are therefore important. One of the first intelligent agents designed to provide personalised advice to help preserve the hearing of individuals experiencing mild hearing loss is presented. The intelligent agent functions as a smartphone app that uses natural language processing to extract information from end-users with mild hearing loss and provides evidence-based personalised advice generated through generative artificial intelligence. The advice was assessed through a tailored criterion inspired by the two validated instruments DISCERN and PEMAT scores. Assessment was undertaken across three dimensions: Relevance (measuring how well the advice is personalised to the user), Accuracy (measuring whether the provided information is accurate), and Understandability (measuring whether the text is easily understandable without specialised knowledge). Measurement across 83 AI-generated responses resulted in the following scores: Relevance (85.5%), Accuracy (80.7%) and Understandability (89.2%).