In recent years, the widespread use of smartphones has made it increasingly possible to improve knowledge, understanding and delivery of hearing healthcare. Melanie Ferguson tells us about the advances in mobile-health applications. Think back to five years ago - what...
Andrej Kral gives us an overview of neuronal plasticity in congenital hearing loss, and discusses why it is core to our clinical interventions in hearing loss and rehabilitation. The brain is born immature and undergoes extensive shaping during early development....
As audiology and ENT professionals we all have an inkling about the prevalence and impact of hearing loss, but the true gravity of the situation is even greater than previously thought… It may seem hard to believe, but in the...
1 July 2019
| Ibrahim Almufarrij, Piers Dawes (Prof), Kevin J Munro (Prof), Michael A Stone, Harvey Dillon (Prof)
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ENTA - Audiology - Adult
How safe and desirable are direct-to-consumer amplification devices? A team has put a range of devices through their paces and compared them to a standard NHS hearing device. Why do most individuals who would benefit from hearing aids not try...
Education and training have a key part to play in the development of leaders of the future; Dorte Hammershøi discusses the educational approaches taken in Denmark and the pros and cons of the methods used. Dorte also explains the BEAR...
Colver Ken Howe Ne, Jameel Muzaffar and Manohar Bance discuss the potential of hearable systems to monitor physiological signals (e.g. from brain or heart, blood pressure, body temperature) unobtrusively. Such adaptations require high-quality sensors and sophisticated de-noising signal processing on...
A hearing aid? A Fitbit? A falls alert device? A ‘Healthable’? Achin Bhowmik discusses how Starkey’s Livio AI came to market and what it means for the future of amplification devices. Achin Bhowmik. Achin, you have an interesting background in...
1 November 2019
| James Bates, Christopher Frerk (Prof)
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ENTA - General
James Bates and Chris Frerk are both passionate about how human factors science can improve safety in healthcare and have co-authored this article describing how communication, ergonomics and other non-technical skills are making operating theatres safer. There is no doubt...
Forty years since the first multi-channel devices were implanted, who better than Ingeborg Hochmair, who has been a key figure throughout their evolution, to offer her thoughts on the past, present and future of multi-channel cochlear implants? Read on for...
Can bespoke cochlear implant programming strategies reduce the variability seen in patient performance with an implant? Bob Carlyon reviews the current situation and gives us a glimpse of the future. Although many cochlear implant (CI) patients understand speech well in...
ENT surgeons’ role in advanced skull base resection and reconstruction continues to grow; this article explores how 3D printing aids planning and repair of complex defects. The integrity of the craniofacial skeleton is essential for both functional and aesthetic reasons....
This story is dedicated to my dear friend and much-missed colleague, Heinz Stammberger, with whom some of these moments were shared (or endured). Having used a rigid endoscope in my postgrad thesis in the early 1980s to show that the...