Hearing Loss


Book Description

Millions of Americans experience some degree of hearing loss. The Social Security Administration (SSA) operates programs that provide cash disability benefits to people with permanent impairments like hearing loss, if they can show that their impairments meet stringent SSA criteria and their earnings are below an SSA threshold. The National Research Council convened an expert committee at the request of the SSA to study the issues related to disability determination for people with hearing loss. This volume is the product of that study. Hearing Loss: Determining Eligibility for Social Security Benefits reviews current knowledge about hearing loss and its measurement and treatment, and provides an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the current processes and criteria. It recommends changes to strengthen the disability determination process and ensure its reliability and fairness. The book addresses criteria for selection of pure tone and speech tests, guidelines for test administration, testing of hearing in noise, special issues related to testing children, and the difficulty of predicting work capacity from clinical hearing test results. It should be useful to audiologists, otolaryngologists, disability advocates, and others who are concerned with people who have hearing loss.










Instrumentation for Audiology and Hearing Science


Book Description

Understanding the array and complexity of instrumentation available to audiologists and hearing scientists is important to students, beginning clinicians, and even seasoned professionals. The second edition of Instrumentation for Audiology and Hearing Science: Theory and Practice is a comprehensive and accessible look at instrumentation used in these fields for research and clinical purposes. The expert authors introduce the laws of physics as they relate to audiology and hearing science and explain a range of concepts in electronics directly related to instrumentation used in audiology and hearing science, such as filtering and immittance (involving admittance and impedance), explain the fundamental instrumentation concepts in mathematics, physics, and electronics in a systematic manner including only the necessary formulae and basic scientific principles. This unique professional text presents the fundamentals of the evolution of communication systems from analog to digital, including such concepts as digital signals, sound resolution, sampling, quantization and their applications to current technology such as video calls and noise canceling head phones. In addition, the authors comprehensively cover calibration of test and research equipment and stimuli used in audiology and hearing science. They also clearly describe elements of electronics and digital technology as they apply to our everyday lives and experiences, as well as to the fields of audiology and hearing sciences. New to the Second Edition * New chapters on amplification, assistive listening devices, and vestibular assessment (electronystagmography and videonystagmography), geared toward audiology and hearing science students and professionals * Extensive reorganization for a smoother flow of information * Expanded focus on evidence-based practice * Informed by the authors’ teaching, research, and clinical experiences, the original chapters have either been eliminated or completely updated to reflect current scientific and clinical theories * Accompanying videos for the construction of direct- and alternating-current electrical circuits, as well as the construction of high-pass, low-pass, and band-pass filters







Hearing Harmony


Book Description

An original, listener-based approach to harmony for popular music from the rock era of the 1950s to the present




Disability and Social Representations Theory


Book Description

Disability and Social Representations Theory provides theoretical and methodological knowledge to uncover the public perception of disabilities. Over the last decade there has been a significant shift from body to environment, and the relation between the two, when understanding the phenomenon of disabilities. The current trend is to view disabilities as the outcome of this interaction; in short from a biopsychosocial perspective. This has called for research based on frameworks that incorporate both the body and the environment. There is a great corpus of knowledge of the functions of a body, and a growing corpus of environmental factors such as perceptions among specific groups of persons towards disabilities. However, there is a lack of knowledge of the perception of disabilities from a general population. This book offers an insight into how we can broaden our understanding of disability by using Social Representations Theory, with specific examples from studies on hearing loss. The authors highlight that attitudes and actions are outcomes of a more fundamental disposition (i.e., social representation) towards a phenomenon like disability. This book is written assuming the reader has no prior knowledge of Social Representations Theory. It will be of interest to all scholars, students and professionals working in the fields of disability studies, health and social care, and sociology.




Clinical Aspects of Hearing


Book Description

The Springer Handbook of Auditory Research presents a series of com prehensive and synthetic reviews of the fundamental topics in modem auditory research. It is aimed at all individuals with interests in hearing research including advanced graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and clinical investigators. The volumes will introduce new investigators to important aspects of hearing science and will help established investigators to better understand the fundamental theories and data in fields of hearing that they may not normally follow closely. Each volume is intended to present a particular topic comprehensively, and each chapter will serve as a synthetic overview and guide to the literature. As such, the chapters present neither exhaustive data reviews nor original research that has not yet appeared in peer-reviewed journals. The series focuses on topics that have developed a solid data and conceptual foundation rather than on those for which a literature is only beginning to develop. New research areas will be covered on a timely basis in the series as they begin to mature. Each volume in the series consists of five to eight substantial chapters on a particular topic. In some cases, the topics will be ones of traditional interest for which there is a solid body of data and theory, such as auditory neuroanatomy (Vol. 1) and neurophysiology (Vol. 2). Other volumes in the series will deal with topics which have begun to mature more recently, such as development, plasticity, and computational models of neural processing.