Newborn screening devices are machines that test a newborn baby's hearing and eyes in the first days of life, before any problem can be seen. Screening means testing everyone in a group, not only those with symptoms, to find the few who need a full test. Newborn screening also includes blood tests from a heel prick, but those are done in a laboratory. This page is about the devices used at the bedside.
Hearing is tested in two ways, and both work while the baby sleeps. The first is the otoacoustic emissions (OAE) test. A soft probe in the ear canal plays clicks. A healthy inner ear answers with a very faint sound of its own, which a microphone in the probe picks up. The test takes about a minute for each ear. The second is the automated auditory brainstem response (AABR) test. Small stickers on the head measure the brain's electrical response to sounds played into the ear.
Neither device asks the nurse to interpret a signal. The software compares the response with the expected pattern and shows one of two results: "pass" or "refer". "Refer" does not mean that the baby cannot hear. It means that the baby needs a full hearing test by a specialist. This kind of sorting, deciding who needs to be seen next, is a form of triage.
Eyes are screened too. Babies born very early are at risk of retinopathy of prematurity, a disease in which blood vessels at the back of the eye grow abnormally. A wide-field camera takes pictures of the retina, and a specialist, or software, reads them. It works on the same idea as the retinal camera with AI screening used for adults.
Here is a typical case. At a government hospital in Patna, a nurse tests a 2-day-old girl with an OAE device before the family goes home. Her left ear passes. Her right ear shows "refer". The nurse repeats the test an hour later, and the result is the same. The device stores the result with the baby's details. The result goes into the hospital EHR, and the family is given a date for a full hearing test within three months.
Finding hearing loss early matters, because in the first years of life, a child learns language by hearing the people around them. In India, the government's child health programme, Rashtriya Bal Swasthya Karyakram (RBSK), includes screening for hearing and vision problems at birth. A baby's results can also be linked to an ABHA health account, so that the next hospital can see them.