Active clinical trials for "Deafness"

A newly developed MED-EL Cochlear Implant incorporates the anti-inflammatory agent dexamethasone (DEX) into the electrode array. The passive elution of DEX during the post-implantation period has the purpose of counteracting the increase of the post-operative impedance induced by the insertion trauma. The aim of this clinical investigation is to obtain a first experience in use of the investigational device in the adult clinical population, and to initially assess tools, techniques and performance outcome measures that may be considered in future clinical studies of similar devices.

ASL-ADE will evaluate the efficacy of an ASL-interpreted diabetes educational intervention to the end of improving the health literacy of the target population and addressing their disparate health outcomes.

The goal of the proposed project is to create an Audiobooks for Hearing Loss (HL) App - an audiobook App that has a wide array of user-selectable features designed to provide auditory training. The effects of the Audiobooks for Hearing Loss App as Auditory Training for those With CI and HA Users was measured with a 6-week trial of using the app and measuring changes in listener abilities and adherence to the program.

Pomegranate has anti-oxidative capacity. It might reduce symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, Drug-induced hepatitis, and might prevent deterioration of cardiovascular diseases and cancer progression. But, the beneficial effects of pomegranate on hearing impairment was still unclear. This study aimed to investigate the beneficial effects of pomegranate on hearing impairment by a prospective, randomized, double-blinded clinical trial design. The investigators'll include 120 elderly patients without hemodialysis in our hospital, and divided them into 2 groups. Control group will receive placebo treatment; pomegranate group will receive oral pomegranate (500 mg, twice per day). All patients received the above treatment for 9 months, and underwent pure tone audiometry and word discrimination scores before the start of the clinical trial and at the end of the treatment (9th month).

There is evidence that the sensor function of the utricle in patients with bilateral labyrinthine dysfunction (bilateral vestibulopathy) may improve balance under the influence of high frequency basal stimulation of the cochlea. The aim of the study is to measure the possible co-stimulation of the utricle (which is determined by the SVV) by tonotopic (frequency-specific) cochlear stimulation and thus to objectify whether the stimulation of the auditory nerve in CI patients also leads to an unavoidable co-stimulation of the vestibular system.

Hearing loss is a common health problem in Alaska. Up to 75% of children growing up in Alaskan villages experience frequent ear infections, one of the major treatable causes of hearing loss. Children with even mild hearing loss face many challenges. These children often experience speech and language delays and have trouble in school. Teens with hearing loss are more likely to drop out of school, and are at risk for having difficulty finding jobs as adults. Promptly diagnosing and treating hearing loss is important for preventing these consequences. Alaska mandates school-based hearing screening, but many children with hearing loss are not identified by the current screening protocol, and most who are referred never make it into the healthcare system for diagnosis and treatment. Alaska has already developed innovative strategies to address hearing loss. A network of village health clinics staffed by community health aides provide local care, and telemedicine has been adopted in over 250 village clinics statewide. Despite being widely available, telemedicine has not yet been used in school hearing screenings to speed up the referral process. Norton Sound Health Corporation has partnered with Duke and Johns Hopkins Universities to explore whether a new school screening and referral process that incorporates mobile, or mHealth, screening and telemedicine referral will reduce childhood hearing loss disparities in the Norton Sound region. Children from kindergarten through 12th grade in 15 Norton Sound villages will receive the current school screening protocol and the new mHealth screen. Villages will then be randomized to continue the current primary care referral process or to adopt telemedicine referral for school screenings. The investigators hypothesize that the new mHealth screening protocol will identify more children with hearing loss, and telemedicine referral will reduce time to diagnosis. By better identifying hearing loss and speeding up diagnosis and treatment, the investigators expect the burden of childhood hearing loss to drop, hearing-related quality of life to improve, and school performance to improve in villages with telemedicine referral compared to current primary care referral villages. If the study shows these positive effects, mHealth screening and the telemedicine referral process could be implemented in school districts across the state of Alaska to reducing childhood hearing loss disparities statewide.

Our goal is to design and build a new hearing aid system, which mitigates the most common complaints that hearing aid users have. These include hearing in multi-talker situations, poor sound quality, unwanted whistling resulting from feedback, and a dislike of the sound of their own voice. Current efforts, with limited success, use signal processing methods rather than restoring more closely the normal auditory function. We plan to achieve our goal by reducing to practice three key enabling concepts. The first is to replace the current acoustic transducer with a non-acoustic mechanical output transducer that directly actuates the tympanic membrane (TM). This transducer, called the EarLens, floats on the tympanic membrane in a manner similar to the way a contract lens floats on the eye. The second is to increase the output bandwidth of the hearing aid. The third key concept is to place a wide-bandwidth microphone in the ear canal to capture the pinna diffraction cues similarly to the way the normal ear functions. Our central hypothesis is that a hearing aid that delivers amplified wide-bandwidth mechanical stimuli, directionally dependent cues, in an open canal configuration will perform better than conventional hearing aids when there are competing talkers in the background. First phase includes verification the capability of the system to deliver sufficient maximum equivalent pressure output (MEPO) to treat the degree of hearing loss in the target fitting range.

This study evaluates the benefit of Neuro 1 sound processor upgrade in speech perfomance in adults. Half of participants will be tested with Neuro 1 first and Neuro 2, while the other half will be tested with Neuro 2 first and then Neuro 1.

This study will determine the facilitation, refractoriness and spatial spread effects of auditory nerve fiber responses to electrical stimulation via a cochlear implant. The performance of CI users in melody contour and speech recognition in noise tests with their own clinical sound processor and a MATLAB implementation of their coding strategy will be compared and a bioinspired coding strategy will be evaluated in comparison with the conventional ACE coding strategy.

We recently developed a new Neuro-immersion system based on virtual reality and 3D (dimension) motion tracking. This tool makes it possible to evaluate and record the spatial localization performance of sounds and to highlight localization deficits in the three dimensions of space in deaf patients. Unfortunately, there is currently no suitable support to compensate for these localization deficits. However, the discomfort felt by the patients is clearly verbalized. Thanks to the new virtual reality system, we are now able to develop a training protocol based on spatial sound localization tasks.