Caterpillar a hearing help
After countless doctors' visits with his five-year-old son Cooper, Luke Brook has developed an app that allows him to test the extent of his son's hearing loss at home.
The Edith Cowan University PhD student, who has been named a finalist in the WA Information Technology and Telecommunications Awards, hopes the app will help other families screen their children for potential hearing loss.
Mr Brook said he had known that Cooper had a problem with his hearing for some time before he was diagnosed with hearing loss when he was one.
"He passed his newborn hearing screening assessment and we had spoken to doctors who said that because he had passed that test, they didn't think there was anything wrong," he said.
"But then we found out he had a middle-ear infection and it wasn't until after that and he had grommets that they came back and said he does actually have hearing loss as well."
Mr Brook said he hoped the app, which uses the popular children's story The Very Hungry Caterpillar to screen a child's hearing in less than 10 minutes, would help fight undiagnosed hearing loss in remote indigenous communities where rates of hearing loss were up to 10 times the Australian average.
