Quick Dips

Helping the
Hearing-Impaired

Identifying hearing loss in babies and helping hearing-impaired children in the classroom will be two of the benefits from research carried out by audiology students at the University of Auckland School of Medicine.

The important research into hearing was recognised by the Oticon Foundation, which recently awarded its annual prizes of $500 to Maree Harper, Denise Farrington and Michael Sharp for the best student research projects in audiology in 1995 and 1996.

Farrington looked at the specific characteristics of a phenomenon called otoacoustic emissions, very fine sounds produced by the healthy ear which can only be picked up with a microphone.

"These sounds tell us a lot about how the cells inside the ear are working," explains Dr Peter Thorne, head of the audiology section in the medical school's Physiology Department. By analysing the sounds it's possible to tell whether a person's hearing is damaged.

"It's an objective measure of how the ear is working. We're trying to adapt that to detect hearing loss in babies."

Harper explored the acoustics of classrooms and how they can affect children who have hearing loss.

"Classrooms tend to be very reverberant," says Thorne. "There's a lot of noise that affects the ability of children to hear the teacher, and this can affect classroom performance."

Harper's research investigated the effects of echoes on the speech perception of hearing-impaired children. Sharp developed a computer model to measure and analyse otoacoustic emissions.

"When we do recordings from subjects we can now analyse the sounds and determine how they relate to hearing loss," says Thorne.