Page 12 University Daily Kansan, April 29, 1982
621
Program analyzes hearing handicaps
By TOM HUTTON Staff Reporter
KANSAS CITY, Kan. - Vault-like doors sealed 7-year-old Shelly into a soundproof cocoon. Her long, dark hair shone on the harsh fluorescent lights, but her smiling face had deteriorated into a frown.
It was time for some serious work.
It was time for some serious work.
Beeps invaded the silence, and Shila fragile hand lifted as she acknowledged she had heard the sounds.
Shelly progressed from simple tone hearing tests to examinations that tested her ability to distinguish voices from background noises. She passed the tone tests easily, but not soundly from background noise, such as traffic and light talking.
Shelly's problem is not unique—more than 18 million Americans suffer from varying degrees of speech or hearing defects. More people suffer from these problems than from cancer, tuberculosis, heart disease and multiple sclerosis combined, according to the National Institute for the Deaf.
She is not deaf. Shelly has problems interpreting sounds. She hears the sounds perfectly, as long as they are in a quiet environment. As soon as Shelly was placed in a classroom or other less-than-perfect situations, she could not understand even the simplest instructions. Her problems had forced her parents to employ special tutors and caused the public schools to label her "learning disabled," although she had an above-average IQ.
Finding why Shelly could not distinguish sounds normally is the work of the speech and hearing department at University of Kansas Medical Center.
IT WILL TAKE about five weeks for Jeff Owen, assistant professor of hearing and speech, to design a program for Shelly and test it thoroughly. The program, if successful, will teach her to deal with the hearing disability and send her back to school without her "disabled" label.
Although not all the problems at the Med Center are as unusual as Shelyl's, her's is a good example of the time when discovery of process of discovering hearing disorders.
"Instead of just seeing kids and sending them down the road, we concentrate on their problems and do everything within our power to solve them," Randy Laskowski, graduate student in audiology, said recently.
Laskowski works with the children treated in the hearing clinic, children who range in age from just a few months to the late teens.
Laskowski must test the softest sound that each ear can receive and the
frequencies at which those sounds can be heard.
However, Laskowski often works with children who, unlike Shelly, are too young to know when to raise a hand. They are unable to respond.
"If I could just get them to raise their hands, everything would be easy—but I can't," he said.
To test these children, Laskowiak uses monitoring machines that look as if they have been salvaged from the space program.
The machine most often used sits in another sound-proof room.
A BLUE TABLE with a connected chair sits in the center of the room and waits to hold the next squirming youngster to undergo hearing tests. A
'Instead of just seeing kids and sending them down the road, we concentrate on their problems and do everything within our power to solve them.'
—Randy Laskowski, graduate student in audiology
large silver button in the middle of the table is Lawkowski's key to getting the uncooperative children to respond to sounds.
When pressed, the button rewards the child with his favorite object—anything from money to food.
It often takes several visits to record an accurate test on these difficult children, Laskowski said, but the results are worth the extra effort.
“What we’re trying to do here is get the most precise testing levels possible—which isn’t easy sometimes with the little ones.” Laskowski said.
"We don't just take readings here," Laskowski said. "We're different than most clinics in our operating fashion. We have to come in when we deal with the hearing problem."
Hearing deficiencies seen at the Med Center vary widely, Laskowski said. Hearing losses in children, he said, were usually a result of congenital disorders, or diseases, or were induced by chemotherapy and cancer-treating drugs.
"It really doesn't matter how the child became impaired," Laskowski said. "It still is a problem that they have with it, with, and one that we try to ally-
Captioned television programs, telephone teletype machines and greatly improved hearing aids have become the hearing impaired in the last 10 years.
It is Laskowski's job to decide whether the hearing loss is a result of problems in the outer, middle or inner ear. If the problem can be solved by sound amplification, he sends the patient to a hearing aid dealer.
Nearly 85 percent of the hearing patients can be treated in some manner, June Miller, chairman of the hearing and speech department, said. And it makes little difference whether a person is six months old or 60 years old.
"The space program, solid-state technology and miniaturization have all changed the ways we can assist people with communication problems," Miller said. "I told them that someday there would be hearing aids that couldn't even be seen—I didn't believe them then."
BUT MILLER opened a cabinet and pointed to hearing aids, and even artificial voiceboxes, that were made to be easily concealed.
Other devices for the hearing impaired also have been miniaturized as technology has advanced.
For example, telephone communication for the deaf, which started in the '50s with expensive, cumbersome word processors, are soon to be mobile.
These four-foot-high, 290-pound $2,000 machines could be used for communication between deaf people only if each person owned one of them.
The Med Center owns such a machine and uses it to schedule appointments for its deaf patients. It also relays information from the deaf to other departments.
"I have a serious case of bronchitis,
unable to work today, have an appointment this afternoon with the doctor," a message recorded on the machine from a deaf volunteer employee.
Such cumbersome communication is on the way out if a speech and hearing scientist, who recently visited the Med Center, has his way.
Harry Levitt, professor of speech and hearing at New York City University, developed a pocket-size telecommunicator that performed many more functions than the bulky teletype machines did.
Levit's machine allows deaf people who do not know sign language to communicate. it has a memory for commonly used phrases, is compact and reliable, and Levit said, is cheaply $150. The retail price will be $29.
Levitt developed the computer for a $10,000 contest sponsored by Radio Shack. He won the contest last November, and the company will begin marketing the device in the next few months.
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