E.A.R.S. — AI-Powered WhatsApp Teacher Training for Early Hearing-Loss Detection in South African Schools

The University of Pretoria's WHO Collaborating Centre for the Prevention of Deafness and Hearing Loss, with the hearX Foundation, built E.A.R.S., a free AI-powered WhatsApp training programme that teaches preschool-through-secondary teachers to recognise early signs of childhood hearing loss and refer children for care.

The programme aims to scale hearing-health knowledge among teachers cheaply and without extra apps or hardware, addressing an estimated 90 million children aged 5-19 worldwide with undiagnosed hearing loss, more than 60% of whom could have it prevented or managed if caught early.

An AI agent trained on WHO guidelines answers teachers' questions in real time and delivers about 30-40 minutes of content over four days of infographics and two-minute voice notes, via WhatsApp and the Turn.io messaging platform. It builds on a peer-reviewed 2022 intervention study of an earlier, non-AI WhatsApp training programme for over 1,000 early childhood development practitioners across 31 communities in the Western Cape.

The 2022 precursor study found significantly improved hearing-health knowledge, with gains sustained six months later. Following its March 2026 launch, the AI version enrolled over 10,000 educators and parents within two weeks and more than 12,000 South African teachers within its first month, with an 80%+ completion rate. Among teachers completing both pre- and post-training assessments, 97% passed and over half scored perfectly, with the largest gains among those who started with the lowest baseline knowledge.

Published figures to date cover teacher knowledge gains and enrolment; a peer-reviewed measurement of downstream student learning outcomes from the 2026 AI rollout specifically has not yet been published.