In an article by a graduate student at the University of Maryland-Baltimore (UMB), Amanda Labuza spoke to the importance of outreach and relayed her experience with UMB’s Neuroscience Outreach and Volunteer Association (NOVA).
Through this experience, Amanda noted,
Topic(s): Hearing
Otoacoustic emissions (OAEs), low-level sounds produced by the healthy cochlea, require normal or near-normal outer hair cells (OHCs) to provide amplification of the backward traveling waves so the outgoing energy can be detected in the ear canal and, for some types of OAEs, to produce the nonlinearities that give rise to the emission itself. As most audiologists know, these low-level acoustic by-products provide an invaluable window into the otherwise inaccessible cochlea and a useful gauge of OHC health and hearing.
Topic(s): otoacoustic emissions (OAEs), Hearing
For children with hearing loss to succeed in school, good access to classroom information is absolutely essential. Acoustic accessibility means that the child’s technology and classroom acoustics need to be monitored, educational staff need to understand the effect of hearing loss on the reception of academic and social information, and teachers need to know how to employ useful classroom modifications. If there is no educational audiologist to advocate for the child, someone else needs to pick up the slack.
Topic(s): Pediatric, Hearing, Patient care
Hearing-care professionals (HCPs) and hearing aid wearers report the chief complaint secondary to hearing loss and to wearing traditional hearing aids, is the inability to understand speech-in-noise (SIN; see Beck et al, 2019). Beck et al (2018) reported that, in addition to the 37 million Americans with audiometric hearing loss, 26 million have hearing difficulty and/or difficulty understanding SIN, despite clinically normal thresholds. As such, helping people hear (i.e., to perceive sound) and helping people listen (i.e., to comprehend, or apply meaning to sound) remains paramount.
Topic(s): speech-in-noise, Hearing, Hearing Loss, Sensorineural Hearing Loss, Noise Reduction, Audiometric Test
Tinnitus is an invisible condition affecting 10 percent to 15 percent of adults (Hoffman and Reed, 2004). Chronic tinnitus is defined as the persistent perception of sound when there is no external source (Jastreboff, 1990). It generally is accepted that tinnitus is manageable and not bothersome for about 80 percent of those who experience it (Davis and Refaie, 2000; Hoffman and Reed, 2004; Jastreboff and Hazell, 1998). That is, most people who experience tinnitus tend to ignore it and are not interested in receiving specialized clinical services.
Topic(s): Hearing, Tinnitus, Sensorineural Hearing Loss, Meniere’s Disease (MD), tinnitus retraining therapy (TRT), Tinnitus Handicap Inventory (THI), Tinnitus Functional Index (TFI), tinnitus education (TED), tinnitus masking (TM)
