The Hearing Clinic
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Tinnitus in the news. A new chat bot to help sufferers.
It was good to see a tinnitus app, called MindEar, make the headlines in the Guardian recently. When you suffer from tinnitus, the nature of the condition can make it easy to feel isolated, so the more coverage tinnitus gets, the more people will start to understand the condition and break down some of the myths surrounding tinnitus. The MindEar app provides cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) via a chatbot, along with other approaches such as sound therapy. CBT can help people suffering from tinnitus to reduce their emotional reaction to the sound, which enables the brain to tune it out. The app is designed to provide an alternative to in-person therapy which…
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What is otosclerosis?
People often think of hearing loss as being something older people get, but there’s one middle ear condition – otosclerosis – that can develop in your teens and young adulthood, and where pregnancy is even a risk factor. What causes otosclerosis? Otosclerosis isn’t a common hearing condition. About one or two people in 100 develop it, but it tends to develop between the ages of 15 and 35. It’s caused when the stapes, the smallest bone in the body but one which is vital to our hearing, gets fixed to the surrounding structure and stops vibrating. Because it’s no longer moving, the stapes stops transmitting sound to the inner ear,…
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Game changing clinical trials coming soon!
A cell therapy to improve hearing could transform the lives of millions of people with hearing loss, new research suggests. The therapy will see the first clinical trial of a stem cell treatment for hearing loss, building on research that resulted in 40% improved hearing in preclinical tests. Sheffield-based biotech company Rinri Therapeutics hopes to start clinical trials in the next two years in people with severe-to-profound age-related hearing loss. Rinri’s work was founded on pioneering research into regenerative cell therapy, led by Professor Marcelo Rivolta at the University of Sheffield. Rinri’s cell therapy, Rincell-1, is for patients with auditory neuropathy, a form of hearing loss which occurs when sounds…
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Which earplugs will give the best protection?
Scientists are working to better understand noise induced hearing loss so we can improve the hearing protection that’s available and even enhance regulations around what companies need to do to protect their workforce. One of the key challenges is that there are different types of sound, and therefore noise exposure. At work or at play, some people are exposed to continuous, long-duration noises, while others may be subject to loud and fast sounds (called ‘impulsive’ noise). What noise are you at risk from? Levels of continuous noise are easier to test, but different loud and fast sounds can cause different types of hearing damage. What’s more, the impact this type…
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Be very careful with who cleans your ears!
You wouldn’t ask your dogwalker for a haircut so why have earwax removal from someone who isn’t a hearing professional? Due to the decommissioning of earwax removal by the NHS in many parts of England you may have noticed a surge in the amount of people – from dieticians to physiotherapists – offering the service in the private sector. A lot of people who don’t work in the hearing sector are seeing this as a chance to cash in, are doing brief training and then offering ear wax removal without sufficient experience or potentially even clinical registration. Please always ensure that you go to an audiologist or hearing aid dispenser…
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Computers eavesdrop on fishy love songs.
It seems that, when the time is right, fish sing songs of love to attract a mate. And they don’t tend to enjoy big solos – preferring to vocalise in choruses which can even be heard from land at low frequencies. But it’s not just other fish who are listening. Biologists in California are eavesdropping on fish populations in the nearby Pacific Ocean to try to identify spawning seasons with a view to preserving fish populations and protecting marine health. Capturing the recordings was just the beginning. Highly skilled acousticians would then need to listen to weeks or months of recordings to pick out the fish chorusing sounds – a process…
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Your Life, with Subtitles
A new tech breakthrough is helping to better connect deaf and hearing impaired people with friends, family and the world around them. The XRAI Glass app uses augmented reality to convert audio to visuals via smart glasses. The user wears a pair of smart glasses that provide subtitles of what’s going on around them in real time. The user simply reads the subtitles which appear instantaneously in front of their eyes. The glasses look like slightly larger-than-average sunglasses, and users can even have their custom prescription spectacle lenses inserted into the XRAI Glass frames. The glasses connect to the XRAI Glass app on the user’s smartphone which will even translate…
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Can the brain be trained to hear sound in background noise?
Scientists studying the brains of old and young mice believe that the brain might be trained to filter out background sound, potentially helping to solve the challenges people with a hearing impairment experience when listening to speech in background noise. Researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine found that old mice were less able than young mice to suppress actively firing brain cells in the midst of ambient noise making it difficult for the brain to focus on one type of sound — such as spoken words — and filter out surrounding noise. Researchers recorded the activity of 8,000 brain cells, or neurons, in the auditory cortex brain…
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Revealing Churchill’s Hearing Loss
Like many people, as Winston Churchill got older he began to suffer from hearing loss. Records in the government’s archives shed light on this little-known aspect of his life as well as the technology that was installed in the House of Commons chamber to help him work effectively. Churchill was initially reluctant to admit that his hearing was deteriorating and only had his first hearing aid fitted in 1952, some eight years after his hearing loss was first detected. The hearing aid was made by a company owned by Russian engineer Alexander Poliakoff. However in 1953 Poliakoff’s contract was ended because MI5 was concerned that Soviet Russia could bug the…
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Making space more accessible
In mid-December some 16 ‘AstroAcces’ disability ambassadors took off from Houston, Texas, to test a system that would help to make the physical environment of a space vessel more accessible to people who are blind, deaf or hearing impaired. The ambassadors flew aboard a specially modified Boeing 727 G-FORCE ONE aircraft to test a system created by SonicCloud which might enable improved speech understanding in space. The personalisation software allows the user to tailor audio, delivered through Sony headphones, to their hearing ability. This was a first global mission comprising people from different countries and saw the ambassadors taking part in weightlessness testing. Other experiments looked at how the physical environment aboard…
