Dr Julia Wunderlich1,2, Mr Onn Wah Lee1,2,3, Dr Darren Mao1, Dr Gautam Balasubramanian1, Ms Mica Haneman1, Dr Mikhail Korneev1, Professor Colette McKay1,2
1Bionics Institute, East Melbourne, Australia, 2Department of Medical Bionics, University of Melbourne, Australia, 3Centre for Rehabilitation & Special Needs Studies, Faculty of Health Sciences, Malaysia
Newborn hearing screening has made a massive difference to early intervention for infants with hearing loss. However, many infants still suffer a delay between diagnosis and the establishment of the optimum hearing instrument and its accurate programming. We present our current progress with EarGenie™, a complete assessment system using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), to measure speech detection and discrimination ability in infants as young as two months old with our clinical “Speech Module”. As well as being a fully objective test, EarGenie is as easy to use and interpret as electrophysiology devices, and is best used during natural sleep.
A measure of speech discrimination ability will provide information that eliminates much of the waiting and guesswork in critical clinical decision making in key populations: infants with auditory neuropathy (how much can they hear, and what is their speech sound discrimination like?), infants with severe/profound loss (do they need a cochlear implant?) and infants with mild or unilateral loss (would they benefit from aiding at all?).
EarGenie’s speech delivery protocol in combination with our novel signal processing algorithm reaches over 95% accuracy in measuring speech detection and discrimination ability in individual, normal-hearing infants. Here, we will also present some case studies using EarGenie in infants with different degrees of sensorineural hearing loss. We believe EarGenie will have extensive utility in diagnostic and rehabilitation audiology clinics to improve the early hearing pathways for infants who are deaf or hard of hearing.
Going forward, we will further develop EarGenie’s “Hearing Module”, which establishes thresholds and comfort levels in sleeping infants (especially needed for infants with auditory neuropathy or to objectively program cochlear implants). We also plan to gather further data in different infant populations (focusing on auditory neuropathy) for the Speech Module, to establish norms in those populations and further prove clinical usefulness.
Biography:
Dr Julia Wunderlich has a PhD in auditory system development and over 35 years’ experience as a paediatric audiologist. She has spent most of her career as a hospital-based paediatric audiologist in the UK and in Victoria (primarily Monash Health). Since 2018 she has been part of the Bionics Institute’s EarGenie™ team, led by Professor Colette McKay, and is now a full-time Senior Clinical Research Fellow with the program which is developing a new clinical system to address some of the most difficult issues facing children who are deaf or hard of hearing.