Effect of a Community Health Worker-Delivered Personal Sound Amplification Device on Self-Perceived Communication Function in Older Adults With Hearing Loss: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

Importance: Age-related hearing loss that impairs daily communication is associated with adverse health outcomes, but use of hearing aids by older adults is low and disparities exist.

Objective: To test whether an affordable, accessible hearing care intervention, delivered by community health workers using over-the-counter hearing technology, could improve self-perceived communication function among older adults with hearing loss compared with a wait-list control.

Design, Setting, And Participants: Open-label randomized clinical trial conducted between April 2018 and October 2019 with 3-month data collection completed in June 2020.

Improving cancer care for underserved populations in an academic and community practice setting: protocol for a community health worker pilot navigation programme.

Introduction: Delaying cancer treatment following diagnosis impacts health outcomes, including increasing patient distress and odds of mortality. Interventions to promote timely healthcare engagement may decrease patient-reported stress and improve quality of life. Community health workers (CHWs) represent an enabling resource for reducing delays in attending initial oncology treatment visits.

Loneliness is Associated With Lower Coping Self-Efficacy Among Older Adults.

To address the gap of lacking research on the association between coping self-efficacy and loneliness, this study examined this relationship to inform future research and intervention on loneliness. Using data from 151 community-dwelling older adults ages 65 and older, we estimated multivariate logistic regression models with age, race/ethnicity, sex, body mass index, chronic disease composite score, social support, coping self-efficacy, and depression symptoms. Loneliness was reported in 32.

Socioeconomic position and hearing loss: current understanding and recent advances.

Purpose Of Review: The purpose of this review is to describe recent literature examining the relationship between socioeconomic position (SEP) and hearing loss, including the impact of hearing loss on several socioeconomic outcomes over the life course. Additionally, we highlight current policy advances in recent years and review alternative models of hearing care that aim to address disparities related to SEP and hearing healthcare.

Recent Findings: Applying a social epidemiologic lens to hearing health gives insight into the role of material and social contexts in understanding and improving hearing health outcomes.

Foundational Approaches to Advancing Hearing Health Equity: A Primer in Social Epidemiology.

Hearing health is inextricably linked to factors beyond biology. Social, demographic, environmental, geographic, and historical influences affect hearing health, but these factors are often unmeasured within traditional biological, clinical, and epidemiological studies of hearing health. With increasing recognition of hearing health over the life course as a public health priority, there is also a growing understanding of existing hearing health inequities at the individual, community, national, and global levels.

Labor Force Participation and Hearing Loss Among Adults in the United States: Evidence From the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

Purpose: The purpose of this article was to study the association between hearing loss (HL) and labor force participation in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).

Method: This cross-sectional study used data from the 1999-2000, 2001-2002, 2003-2004, 2011-2012, and 2015-2016 cycles of the NHANES. The sample was restricted to adults aged 25-65 years with complete audiometric data.

A feedback control principle common to several biological and engineered systems.

Feedback control is used by many distributed systems to optimize behaviour. Traditional feedback control algorithms spend significant resources to constantly sense and stabilize a continuous control variable of interest, such as vehicle speed for implementing cruise control, or body temperature for maintaining homeostasis. By contrast, discrete-event feedback (e.

Mitigating End-of-Life Burden: Parallel Perspectives of Physician-Patients & Family Caregivers.

Context: Patients and family caregivers perceive burden in care at the end of life differently even when the patient is a physican.

Objectives: We describe how older adult physicians as prospective patients (hereafter "physician-patients") and family caregivers of physician-patients view burden in care at the end of life.

Methods: Interviews with physician-patients (n = 28) and family caregivers (n = 26) of physician-patients who had died were conducted as part of a shared decision-making study.

Beam propagation simulation of phased laser arrays with atmospheric perturbations.

Directed energy phased array (DEPA) systems have been proposed for applications such as beaming optical power for electrical use on remote sensors, rovers, spacecraft, and future moon bases, as well as for planetary defense against asteroids and photonic propulsion up to relativistic speeds. All such scenarios involve transmission through atmosphere and beam perturbations due to turbulence that must be quantified. Numerical beam propagation and feedback control simulations were performed using an algorithm optimized for efficient calculation of real-time beam dynamics in a Kolmogorov atmosphere.

A Community Health Worker Training Program to Deliver Accessible and Affordable Hearing Care to Older Adults.

Community leaders collaborated with human-centered design practitioners and academic researchers to co-develop a community health worker (CHW) training program for delivering community-based hearing care to fellow older adults. When implemented by CHWs, clients' communication function improved comparably with outcomes following professional interventions. Community-based models offer opportunities to advance hearing health.

Prevalence of Asymmetric Hearing Among Adults in the United States.

Objective: To estimate the national prevalence of asymmetric hearing among adults through applying two distinct audiometric criteria.

Study Design: National cross-sectional survey.

Setting: Ambulatory examination centers within the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).

Hearing Loss, Loneliness, and Social Isolation: A Systematic Review.

Objective: Social isolation and loneliness are associated with increased mortality and higher health care spending in older adults. Hearing loss is a common condition in older adults and impairs communication and social interactions. The objective of this review is to summarize the current state of the literature exploring the association between hearing loss and social isolation and/or loneliness.

Hearing care across the life course provided in the community.

Untreated hearing loss is recognized as a growing global health priority because of its prevalence and harmful effects on health and well-being. Until recently, little progress had been made in expanding hearing care beyond traditional clinic-based models to incorporate public health approaches that increase accessibility to and affordability of hearing care. As demonstrated in numerous countries and for many health conditions, sharing health-care tasks with community health workers (CHWs) offers advantages as a complementary approach to expand health-service delivery and improve public health.

Travel in city road networks follows similar transport trade-off principles to neural and plant arbors.

Both engineered and biological transportation networks face trade-offs in their design. Network users desire to quickly get from one location in the network to another, whereas network planners need to minimize costs in building infrastructure. Here, we use the theory of Pareto optimality to study this design trade-off in the road networks of 101 cities, with wide-ranging population sizes, land areas and geographies.

Translating Public Health Practices: Community-Based Approaches for Addressing Hearing Health Care Disparities.

Epidemiologic studies reveal disparities in hearing health care with lower prevalence of hearing aid use among older adults from racial/ethnic minority groups and lower socioeconomic positions. Recent national reports recommend exploring innovative delivery models to increase the accessibility and affordability of hearing health care, particularly for underserved and vulnerable populations. With an expected rise in the prevalence of age-related hearing loss over the next four decades due to a rapidly aging population, the condition is a growing public health imperative.

The effect of brief subway station noise exposure on commuter hearing.

Objective: To demonstrate that brief exposure to subway noise causes temporary threshold shift and is preventable with noise protection.

Methods: The study was conducted as a randomized crossover trial. Twenty subjects were randomly assigned to two groups, one with hearing protection and one without.

Multiplexed coded time domain sampling with metamaterials.

The far infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum often necessitates the use of thermal detectors that, by nature, typically have poor response times and diminished sensitivities, at least compared to adjacent bands. However, many signals of interest contain frequency components far too fast to be reliably measured with such detectors, and hence expensive and inefficient alternatives are brought to bear. Here we propose and experimentally validate a new method leveraging the speed and scalability of dynamic metamaterial modulators to encode high-frequency signal components at a lower frequency, making them reliably measurable with thermal detectors that would otherwise be too slow.

Graphene metamaterial spatial light modulator for infrared single pixel imaging.

High-resolution and hyperspectral imaging has long been a goal for multi-dimensional data fusion sensing applications - of interest for autonomous vehicles and environmental monitoring. In the long wave infrared regime this quest has been impeded by size, weight, power, and cost issues, especially as focal-plane array detector sizes increase. Here we propose and experimentally demonstrated a new approach based on a metamaterial graphene spatial light modulator (GSLM) for infrared single pixel imaging.

Using Inspiration from Synaptic Plasticity Rules to Optimize Traffic Flow in Distributed Engineered Networks.

Controlling the flow and routing of data is a fundamental problem in many distributed networks, including transportation systems, integrated circuits, and the Internet. In the brain, synaptic plasticity rules have been discovered that regulate network activity in response to environmental inputs, which enable circuits to be stable yet flexible. Here, we develop a new neuro-inspired model for network flow control that depends only on modifying edge weights in an activity-dependent manner.

Graphene metamaterial modulator for free-space thermal radiation.

We proposed and demonstrated a new metamaterial architecture capable of high speed modulation of free-space space thermal infrared radiation using graphene. Our design completely eliminates channel resistance, thereby maximizing the electrostatic modulation speed, while at the same time effectively modulating infrared radiation. Experiment results verify that our device with area of 100 × 120 µm can achieve a modulation speed as high as 2.

The influence of subway station design on noise levels.

Objectives/hypothesis: To investigate the impact of subway station design on platform noise levels.

Study Design: Observational.

Methods: Continuous A-weighted decibel (dBA) sound levels were recorded in 20 New York City subway stations, where trains entered on either a straight track or curved track in 10 stations each.