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Aural Rehabilitation

Aural Rehabilitation services include a wide variety of things that help people cope with hearing loss. In most other situations in which a person loses some important function, rehabilitation is included as a standard part of treatment. Can you imagine, for example, having knee replacement surgery without having rehabilitation services to help you cope with your new knee.

Yet the vast majority of people with hearing loss are never offered aural rehabilitation, and many of them don't even know what the term means. We think that's a stinging indictment of our hearing loss professionals.

As agencies spring up to serve hard of hearing and late-deafened people, we're starting to see these services become more common. But we've only just begun!

January 2007 - Here's Mark Ross with his discussion of the recent "State of the Science on Aural Rehabilitation" conference.

November 2007 - Auditory Rehabilitation and the Aging Brain

February 2008 - Straight Talk from an Audiologist

March 2008 - Ida Institute Sets Sights on Easing Patient Journey to Better Healing

June 2008 - Tips for Hearing in Noise

June 2008 - HLAA Convention: Is group audiological rehabilitation worth the time, cost, and effort?

July 2008 - The Economics of Computer-Based Auditory Training

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Auditory Rehabilitation and the Aging Brain

November 2007

The speech understanding difficulties expressed by older adults likely arise from multiple sources. From the ear to the brain, numerous structural and chemical changes coincide with advancing age (for a review, see Willott, 1991; 1999). Not only can these changes negatively impact the audibility of sound, physiological changes throughout the auditory system also affect the way frequency and timing information (in the incoming signal) is encoded and perceived (for a review see Chisolm, Willott, & Lister, 2003). Some higher-level cognitive functions, such as attention and memory, also may decline with age. Because perception depends upon lower-level sensory as well as higher-level cognitive processes, it is likely that decreased audibility, slowed neural conduction time, and a struggle to selectively attend to a voice in the presence of competing noise all occur when an older listener tries to understand what is being said (for a review see Pichora-Fuller, Schneider, Benson, Hamstra, & Storzer, 2006). It therefore follows that rehabilitation of the older patient involves more than improving sound audibility, because for many people detecting, discriminating, and attending to the signal of interest might be compromised.   Full Story

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The Economics of Computer-Based Auditory Training

July 2008

Most audiologists agree that fitting hearing aids is just the initial step in the treatment of acquired hearing loss in adults, as there is evidence of the effectiveness of aural rehabilitation to improve long-term benefit from amplification (Sweetow & Palmer, 2005; Hawkins, 2005; Sweetow & Sabes, 2006). Some such evidence includes published reports suggesting that return for credit rates for participants in group aural rehabilitation (AR) classes is p to three times less than for patients who opt not to participate in group AR (Northern & Beyer, 1999). Few audiologists offer any type of aural rehabilitation or auditory training in their daily clinical practice, however, despite evidence supporting its effectiveness. Historically, AR has failed to become embraced by the wider dispensing community for a number of reasons. First, it is viewed as time consuming by many practitioners. Even in the face of solid evidence supporting its effectiveness, AR has not been widely embraced because it has taken time away from the more lucrative and perhaps more rewarding task of fitting hearing aids.    Full Story