pediatrics

From ‘Bionic’ Kid to a Dad Giving Back

I was born with a bilateral, mild-to-profound, sensorineural loss due to BOR Syndrome, a rare syndrome that can affect your hearing and kidneys; my audiogram looks like a double-black-diamond ski slope.

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Verifying a Novel Method for Assessing Speech Motor Skills in Children With Cochlear Implants

By combining principles and tools from engineering and computer science with cognitive and linguistic science, we envision developing robotic devices to deliver speechlike patterns of somatosensory input to the vocal tracts of children who use cochlear implants as they learn to listen to speech sounds through their implant processor.

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From Dark Days to a Bright Future

Networking among parents of children with cochlear implants who live all over the world leads to a solution for a young girl.

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Cochlear Implant Surgery for My Toddler During COVID-19

We couldn’t have predicted a single thing about Jackson’s birth. Delivered in the morning via c-section, with Brendan by my side, baby Jackson’s life began as COVID-19 pandemic had begun to wreak havoc on the U.S. And if the public health situation wasn’t enough of an unexpected challenge during Jackson’s birth

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Measuring Children’s Ability to Hear Speech in Different Competing Backgrounds

Young children spend much of their day listening in noise. However, it is clear that, compared with adults, infants and children are highly susceptible to interference from competing background sounds.

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Evaluation of a New Method for Measuring Pediatric Hearing

In our method, a child is trained to perform a play-based task when a signal is heard. An experimenter—called an observer—watches the child’s behavior to determine when the signal was played. In contrast to clinical testing methods, the signal is randomly placed in one of two intervals for each trial by the computer program.

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Effects of Premature Birth on the Auditory System

In our August 2020 paper in The Hearing Journal, we review causes of prematurity and the typical development of the auditory system. The sensory system, which includes the auditory system, develops in a very specific way inside the womb. This process is interrupted and occurs differently when development continues outside of the womb due to a premature birth.

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What Auditory Processing Disorders Are Really All About

I expand on the information presented, clarify issues, and ensure that readers obtain an appropriate understanding of what auditory processing disorders are really all about, how they are appropriately evaluated, and how specific treatments are identified for the different types of auditory processing disorders (APD) that may be found in a child.

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Making Sound More Visual for Students With Hearing Loss in Your Virtual Classroom

Due to COVID-19, most classrooms will look different this fall. Some will exist in person with social distancing measures in place, while others will be entirely virtual. Many will be a hybrid of both face-to-face and online instruction. As always, there will still be students ready to learn and caring teachers eager to take on the curriculum.

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A Multidisciplinary Approach to Overcome Pediatric Listening Difficulties

Listening difficulties occur in children diagnosed with auditory processing disorders (also known as central auditory processing disorders) and may co-occur in children who have developmental language disorder or attention/memory deficits. Persistent listening difficulties negatively affect children's learning and functioning. Studying factors that influence children’s listening performance using a unified multidisciplinary approach is crucial to better identify and manage deficits that contribute to listening difficulties in children.

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