Judging whether a newborn can hear · Ceded (since 1993)

In March 1993 a consensus conference at the National Institutes of Health called for every newborn to be screened for hearing loss, a programme built from the start on devices that print a pass or a refer with nobody reading the trace.

An automated auditory brainstem response device plays a click, records the response from three electrodes, compares it with a stored template and prints one of two words. The interpretation of the waveform, which is what an audiologist is trained for, was written into the instrument, and the test is run by nursery staff. In 2022 more than 98 percent of babies born in the United States were screened this way, and about 1.7 per 1000 of them were found to have permanent hearing loss. The device does not confirm the loss, which takes a full diagnostic assessment, and it does not tell parents in the first weeks of their child's life what the result means for the years ahead.