Aural Rehabilitation

What Is Aural Rehabilitation?

Aural rehabilitation is the process of helping someone effectively adjust to and manage his or her hearing loss. Methods of rehabilitation are focused on helping overcome the challenges caused by hearing loss, therefore improving the quality of day-to-day life. Adult rehabilitation strategies differ significantly from those used for children.

Adult rehabilitation may be offered in individual or group settings and generally encompasses these main points:

• Adjusting to and learning about your specific type of hearing loss
• Improving communication skills
• How to use, care for, and make the most of your hearing aids
• Exploring accessories for your hearing aids

Hearing Center of Moultrie proudly offers LACE. LACE is an acronym for Listening And Communication Enhancement. Conceived by leading audiologists at the University of California at San Francisco, LACE is an interactive computerized aural rehabilitation program that has already helped thousands of people who live with some degree of hearing loss increase their listening skills by up to 45%.

We don’t really hear in our ears, we hear with our brain. Hearing aids can help a person detect softer sounds, but aren’t able to provide better listening skills. Even people with normal hearing can be poor listeners. Good listening skills are one of the essential components of effective communication.

Other components include rapid thought processing, auditory memory, use of language skills, and interactive strategies. Additionally, the confidence that what you thought you heard was what was actually spoken is vital. These abilities can be damaged both by hearing loss and by the natural aging process. LACE is designed to enhance the ability to communicate by training the brain to best utilize these skills.

Just as physical therapy can help rebuild muscles and adjust movements to compensate for physical weakness or injury, LACE will help you develop skills and strategies to deal with situations when hearing is inadequate. LACE training will help you get the most out of the sounds of life.

Aural rehabilitation looks different for everyone. To find out what is right for you, talk to your hearing care provider.

1) Adjusting To and Learning About Your Specific Type of Hearing Loss

All hearing impairments aren’t the same, which is why it’s important to find out what caused yours, what characterizes your type of loss, and how it affects your functional hearing and communication abilities. This will not only help relieve frustrations when retraining your brain, it will also help you explain to your loved ones and friends what you go through.

2) Improving Communication Skills

Communicating involves more than just verbal skills; there are many pieces involved.

Retraining Your Brain

Your hearing aids allow you to hear sounds you may not have heard in a very long time. It takes time for your brain to get used to those sounds, and aural rehabilitation services offer you strategies to help with this.

Actions speak louder than words

You can also learn to use visual cues. The adage “actions speak louder than words” is very true; the ways in which people augment verbal communication with their facial expressions and gestures help provide clues as to what they are saying.

Lip-reading

Lip-reading helps you understand what sounds look like when people say them. This is more than just being able to read lips — it’s about being able to differentiate words that have similar mouth movements but different meanings.

Finding your place

Communication skills can be improved by learning what environmental settings are best for you to socialize or work in, and how to effectively manage them.

3) How to Use and Make the Most of Your Hearing Aids

Your hearing aid was chosen by you and your provider because it offers the best features for you and your lifestyle. Understanding exactly what your technology is designed to do (and not to do) will help you get the most out of it. Using hearing technology doesn’t mean everything is fixed, so having realistic expectations about what to expect with your devices will help you adjust more successfully to them.

4) Exploring Accessories for Your Hearing Aids

With technological advancements in hearing aids also comes an array of possible accessories! Assistive listening devices that connect to your phone, TV, and music players are just some of the integrative options to accompany your technology. Plan to discuss augmented technologies with your hearing health care provider.

5) Support

There are two main kinds of support for those with hearing impairment. First, there are laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act, which offer accommodations for people with hearing loss in the workplace and other places you frequent (hospitals, churches, and courtrooms). Second, support groups provide significant help in meeting the daily challenges associated with living with hearing loss. While friends and family can be supportive, there’s nothing like talking to someone who knows exactly what you’re going through. Support groups can be found online or through your audiologist.

Rehabilitation is for those who have lost a skill, while habilitation is for those who never had it. The latter is the case for most young children with hearing loss. Children with hearing loss from a very young age face significant communication challenges and delays, and they require specific habilitative interventional techniques to catch up to their normal-hearing peers.

What your child’s habilitation looks like depends on:

• The severity of the impairment
• The child’s age at which the hearing loss occurred, was diagnosed, and was treated
• The type of hearing loss

Development

Identifying hearing loss as early as possible in a child is essential, because their impairment affects their ability to learn speech and language. According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, early detection and early use of amplification has been shown to have a dramatically positive effect on the language abilities of a child with hearing loss.

The Different Parts of Child Aural Rehabilitation

“Auditory perception” is a clinical term that means helping your child:

• Identify sounds
• Tell the difference between sounds
• Attach meaning to sounds

Visual cues

Communication skills can be improved by learning what environmental settings are best for you to socialize or work in, and how to effectively manage them.

Speech improvement

Help them learn to pronounce and enunciate correctly, with more normal voice quality, rate of speech, loudness, and rhythm.

Hearing aids

When kids first get their technology, it is maintained on a daily basis by caregivers or loved ones. As they grow older, it is important to help them get used to adjusting and maintaining the devices themselves at age-appropriate levels, eventually leading them to be the main point of contact with the audiologist.