Who we are
Anybody who has had their hearing tested recently will probably recognise that nothing has changed for a long time. Audiometers (the equipment used to measure hearing) routinely use headphones that were first used by Spitfire Pilots in the Second World War, they are calibrated once a year to British Standards first written long before computers were in common use and the process relies on one to one interaction between the person being tested and the operator which acts as a barrier to people having a test because it is expensive for the provider and time consuming and inconvenient for the person being tested.
Audiology-Online Ltd was formed to bring audiometry up to date with the intention of improving accessibility and driving down costs. It has developed a test with the help of Southampton Solent University which will enable people to take a test (whether it is for, NHS triage, HSE Noise at Work or hearing screening) at a time that suits them.
The founder of Audiology-Online, Mark has been testing peoples hearing for over twenty years. He is a Registered Hearing Aid Dispenser and a Member of the Institute of Acoustics. He is passionate about improving the quality of the current test as well as doing all he can to improve access and convenience in the UK and abroad. Hearing loss is the most globally prevalent disability and he believes it is incongruous that a seventy year old test prevails despite an avalanche of technological development in the intervening years.
Andrew Reid is a Consultant Clinical Scientist (Audiology) as well as a Registered Hearing Aid Dispenser. He studied Zoology/Psychology (BSc) at the University of Wales and then Audiology at Southampton University (MSc). He was Head of the Audiology Department at the Royal United Hospital, Bath from 1989 to 2014 and joined the Board of Audiology-Online following his retirement from the NHS. He has over 50 publications and is first Editor on the book: “Intracranial and Inner Ear Physiology and Pathophysiology”.
Chris worked for a general insurance Company for 23 years working on IBM mainframes in Programming, Data Analysis, Transaction Analysis, Database Design, Online Transaction Systems Support, Database Backup/Recovery/Housekeeping, Test Data Management, Performance Management, Storage Management and Disaster Recovery. He also developed in-house MS Access applications. He moved to PC/Server support and software development in 1999 and has worked with Mark from the start of this project. Audiology-Online owns the intellectual property rights and bespoke software developed by Chris which delivers the test in all of its guises and runs the routines which enable the patent pending headphones to be calibrated.
Reader in Acoustics at Southampton Solent University. Joint lead with Mark Ashmore of a Short Knowledge Transfer Partnership (sKTP) part funded by the Technology Strategy Board to develop the online hearing test product. Outputs from the project include five technical papers based on research around developing the test and internal funding to port the test onto a mobile platform as an app.
