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The importance of hearing aid validation in infants with hearing loss

Hearing aid validation requires that speech discrimination be measured, yet there are no validated methods of measuring speech discrimination in infants and toddlers. Prof Uhler describes two related approaches that are showing promise. Speech discrimination is the gold standard for...

Direct-to-consumer hearing devices: a need to combine cosmetic appeal with device capabilities

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...

Cartilage conduction hearing aids: the third pathway for sound transmission and its application

Air-conduction and bone-conduction are familiar terms; now enter ‘cartilage conduction’. This new term offers a novel approach sound transmission. Hiroshi Hosoi explains the concept and proposes some future applications. The new sound pathway ‘cartilage conduction’ can provide various types of...

Alternobaric vertigo: asymmetrical vestibular function due to asymmetrical middle ear pressures (Iron Man’s archenemy)

The Marvel Cinematic Universe could certainly be deemed an ‘extreme environment’ and yet very rarely do we see the Avenger’s popping to the clinic for a check-up. Hee-Young Kim has wondered how they cope with extreme pressure changes and discusses...

Hearables: in-ear sensing devices for recording of physiological signals

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...

Aided cortical assessment: uses in a paediatric hearing implant centre

When can an aided cortical assessment help decision making in a child’s hearing journey? In this article, the author demonstrates the application using an enlightening case study approach. A device, be it a conventional hearing aid or hearing implant, ideally,...

Adult speech testing in the UK

What do hearing healthcare providers see as the benefits and barriers to delivering speech testing? This article explores the latest research. Why speech testing? Speech tests have been used across ENT and audiology practice to measure an individual’s speech recognition...

Head and neck cancer and PET-CT

Positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET-CT) is an imaging technique in which abnormalities of tissue metabolism are precisely superimposed onto the anatomy. It relies on the premise that malignant cells are more metabolically active compared with non-malignant cells. On this basis,...

TORS for patients with sleep-disordered breathing

Transoral robotic surgery is now a well-accepted technique in malignant tumours of the tongue base. Here the team from St Mary’s and the Royal National Throat Nose & Ear Hospital in London describe its use in carefully selected patients with...

Music and cochlear implants

Introduction The introduction of multichannel cochlear implants (CIs) in the early 1980s provided children and adults with severe and profound hearing losses with greatly improved speech perception skills. In this paper, however, I am going to focus on an area...