Internal herniation is a protrusion of the bowel limited to the abdominal cavity. This pathology is rare and difficult to diagnose due to a wide array of symptoms that may manifest. Internal hernias have the potential to affect surrounding organs such as the stomach and adjacent bowel due to the compressive force of the protruding bowel.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Difficult communication environments are common in military settings, and effective voice use can be critical to mission success. This study aimed to estimate the prevalence of self-reported voice disorders among U.S.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough the behavioral pure-tone threshold audiogram is considered the gold standard for quantifying hearing loss, assessment of speech understanding, especially in noise, is more relevant to quality of life but is only partly related to the audiogram. Metrics of speech understanding in noise are therefore an attractive target for assessing hearing over time. However, speech-in-noise assessments have more potential sources of variability than pure-tone threshold measures, making it a challenge to obtain results reliable enough to detect small changes in performance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Self-adjustment of hearing aid amplification enables wearers to customize the hearing aid output to match their preferences and could become an important tool for programming direct-to-consumer devices for people with mild-to-moderate hearing loss. One risk is that user-selected settings may provide inadequate audibility. This study assessed that risk by quantifying relationships between self-adjusted settings, subjective preferences, and speech recognition performance using speech at low levels in quiet, where achieving high speech audibility requires sufficient amplification.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Many individuals with noise-related hearing loss continue working in environments where they are periodically exposed to high levels of noise, which increases their risk for further hearing loss. These individuals often must remove their hearing aids in operational environments because of incompatibility with the mandated personal protective equipment, thus reducing situational awareness. Extended-wear hearing aids might provide a solution for these individuals because they can be worn for weeks or months at a time, protect users from high-level noise exposures, and are compatible with communication headsets, earmuffs, and other types of personal protective equipment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSelf-adjustment of hearing aid gain can provide valuable information about the gain preferences of individual listeners, but these preferences are not well understood. Listeners with mild-to-moderate hearing loss used self-adjustment to select amplification gain and compression parameters in real time on a portable touch screen device while listening in quiet and noisy backgrounds. Adjustments to gain prescribed by the National Acoustics Laboratories' non-linear fitting procedure (NAL-NL2) showed large between-subject variability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study looked at different methods to preserve interaural level difference (ILD) cues for bilateral cochlear implant (BiCI) recipients. One possible distortion to ILD is from automatic gain control (AGC). Localization accuracy of BiCI recipients using default versus increased AGC threshold and linked AGCs versus independent AGCs was examined.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe current study used the self-fitting algorithm to allow listeners to self-adjust hearing-aid gain or compression parameters to select gain for speech understanding in a variety of quiet and noise conditions. Thirty listeners with mild to moderate sensorineural hearing loss adjusted gain parameters in quiet and in several types of noise. Outcomes from self-adjusted gain and audiologist-fit gain indicated consistent within-subject performance but a great deal of between-subject variability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNormal-hearing listeners show masking release, or better speech understanding in a fluctuating-amplitude masker than in a steady-amplitude masker, but most cochlear implant (CI) users consistently show little or no masking release even in artificial conditions where masking release is highly anticipated. The current study examined the hypothesis that the reduced or absent masking release in CI users is due to disruption of linguistic segmentation cues. Eleven CI subjects completed a sentence keyword identification task in a steady masker and a fluctuating masker with dips timed to increase speech availability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Speech Lang Hear Res
October 2014
Purpose: The present study examined cochlear implant (CI) users' perception of vowels presented concurrently (i.e., double vowels) to further our understanding of auditory grouping in electric hearing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNormal-hearing (NH) listeners maintain robust speech understanding in modulated noise by "glimpsing" portions of speech from a partially masked waveform--a phenomenon known as masking release (MR). Cochlear implant (CI) users, however, generally lack such resiliency. In previous studies, temporal masking of speech by noise occurred randomly, obscuring to what degree MR is attributable to the temporal overlap of speech and masker.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe present study aimed to examine the effect of electrode configuration, specifically monopolar (MP) or bipolar (BP) stimulation, on place pitch discrimination in cochlear implants (CIs). Twelve subjects implanted with the Nucleus Freedom device were presented with various pairs of stimulation across the electrode array, with varying degrees of distance between stimulation sites, and asked to judge the higher of the two in pitch. Each pair was presented either in the same mode or in different modes of stimulation for the within-mode or across-mode condition, respectively, at least 20 times.
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