Software Development
Online Hearing Care provides a fully remote hearing test service that achieves the same level of accuracy as an in-person appointment at a fully equipped audiology clinic. Remote audio tests can be taken through various channels, including online, on mobile, and via dedicated mail order devices.
In collaboration with scientists of auditory perception and machine learning from Cambridge and Manchester universities OHC developed an innovative hearing test algorithm in MATLAB (a maths software package often used in universities) that can determine the level of hearing loss in patients. OHC tasked us with transforming this into an online service that would be publicly available, highly performant, scalable and user friendly. Importantly, OHC had a four-week deadline for the initial product implementation.
InnovaLab developed a complete digital cloud platform for OHC from UI/UX and APIs to DevOps and cloud hosting. Our solution comprised of a fast and responsive ‘React’ UI for test taking and a set of .NET 6 API microservices including a hearing test algorithm API. One of the most challenging and novel aspects of this project was formulating a strategy for the hosting of the hearing test algorithm within the constraint of a short time frame, which ruled out a rewrite in python. Instead, we opted for integrating the MATLAB algorithm into a .NET 6 library and containerising it using docker. After much consultation with the developers of MATLAB our architects found a solution to compile and call the algorithm from .NET code. This was a significant achievement because it allowed us to deliver the finished product within the limited time constraints and highlights the ingenuity of our engineers.
