A multimodal database for the collection of interdisciplinary audiological research data in Spain

Hearing loss constitutes a major disability that hinders communication and quality of life. Recent evidence has uncovered its impact on cognitive decline, thus highlighting its multifactorial dimension and the outstanding need for creating multimodal hearing datasets that further cover clinical data across different health domains. The aim of this study is to develop a multi-collaborative database to systematically collect and analyze interdisciplinary data for audiological research, including auditory thresholds, speech tests, auditory evoked potentials, cognitive and quality-of-life tests, and medical images, among others. The database has been implemented in the Otorhinolaryngology Service of the Virgen Macarena University Hospital in Seville, integrated in the Intranet of the Andalusian Health Service, connected to the electronic patients’ medical records. This database relies on open-source software and complies with national and international guidelines on data protection. A specific registry module has been designed to automatically import auditory thresholds and auditory evoked potentials from clinical devices into the platform. A mobile app has also been implemented to collect questionnaires from patients remotely. A demo web version of the platform is freely available to the audiology community. The multimodal platform developed paves the way towards a multi-collaborative and unified framework for audiology research in Spain. Nevertheless, support from clinicians and healthcare stakeholders remains critical to develop more evidence and high-quality multimodal open datasets in hearing research.