Aural Rehab & You

Aural rehabilitation (AR) is a comprehensive program designed to enhance your ability to engage in activities negatively affected by hearing loss, improving your quality of life.

While you hear physically with your ears, they only collect sound and transmit it to your brain. Hearing loss and neurologically based learning differences often cause auditory processing deficits that are more cognitively- and language-based, occurring at a higher level in the auditory system.

Auditory rehabilitation helps with:

• Temporal processing: Response speed, timing, pitch, rhythm and patterning cues.
• Spatial awareness: Being able to localize where sound originates, contributing to response times.
• Decoding: Being able to identify and manipulate speech phenomes.
• Auditory closure: Ability to fill in gaps when presented with degraded or rapid speech.
• Auditory figure ground: Understanding speech in background noise.
• Dichotic listening: Handling competing signals simultaneously.

Develop a Hearing Loss Management Plan

While hearing aids are a key component of AR, you will also complete a needs assessment with your audiologist to identify situations where hearing is challenging for you even while wearing your hearing aids. You’ll work together to create a hearing loss management plan that may include:

• Auditory training programs to improve your listening and concentration skills in difficult listening environments
• Communication strategies to make holding conversations easier
• Relaxation techniques to support your well-being
• Peer support groups to find support and build confidence

Your Central Auditory System

Your central auditory system operates on a tonotopic organization, where cells responsive to different frequencies are arranged in an orderly manner, from low to high frequency, much like a piano keyboard. Each part of your auditory system “hears” different sounds, just like each key on a piano plays a different note. And, when people talk, they use different notes (which we call pitch), lengths of sounds (duration) and patterns of sounds (rhythm). Just like you can’t run a marathon without learning to walk, run or pace yourself, you can’t handle background noise if you aren’t hearing specific details in quiet or managing your listening fatigue—all things that AR can help with.

How AR Can Improve Your Life

According to the Hearing Loss Association of America, AR can:

• Minimize your perception of hearing issues
• Enhance your perception of your quality of life
• Help you master hearing technology and communication strategies

A Personalized Treatment Plan

Once we identify areas of weakness, we prescribe a personal treatment plan for you combining technology options with auditory brain training. The goal is being able to navigate your hearing world with less effort and increased confidence.

Therapy may include the use of commercial programs that staff have been certified in, such as Interactive Metronome, Acoustic Pioneer and Neuronet, in combination with custom-designed therapy for each patient to meet them where they are developmentally.