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SIG Perspectives
Although there are extensive resources in ways to assess hearing loss and outcomes of
hearing intervention in children and adults, research is needed to be more innovative to
assess hearing health care in a multifaceted way. The first article in this SIG 7 activity
includes information about a new pediatric speech in noise screener Hearing
Assessment in Response to Noise Screener (HeARS) that can be used as an app.
School-age children spend a significant amount of time in noisy listening environments
and research has demonstrated that background noise can have a detrimental effect on
speech-language as well as academic performance. This is even more prominent in
children with hearing loss. Having said that, there are not many ways to evaluate speech
understanding in noise performance for these children. This article discusses the
preliminary results of using this app on children aged 4 to 14 years. The test allows
assessing children’s ability to understand speech in presence of noise in varying signal
to noise ratios (SNR) conditions. Their study concludes that this test is acceptable to use
in children and can accurately demonstrate increasing difficulty in speech understanding
with decreasing SNR. This test has the potential to be used by clinicians in making
audiology assessment more accessible. Next, the second article includes information on
quality-of-life outcomes after cochlear implantation. Although cochlear implants have
been shown to improve quality of life, these quality-of-life changes can be perceived
differently by the implant recipient and their communication partners. This article
discusses the preliminary results of a case study that explored general and hearing related
quality of life changes after implantation, as perceived by the recipients and their
frequent communication partners. Their study concludes that although results for both
groups were comparable, there was low agreement in the disease-specific quality of life
change ratings. This suggests the importance of better communication between
recipients and their partners and the importance of including communication partners in
hearing health care.
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