Adult Aural Rehabilitation
If you are an adult, aural rehabilitation services will focus on adjusting to your hearing loss, making the best use of your hearing aids, exploring assistive devices that might help, managing conversations, and taking charge of your communication. Services can be individual, in small groups, or a combination of both.
Topics typically covered.
- Your hearing loss. It is important to understand your specific hearing loss. Sometimes it takes several discussions with your audiologist and with your family for things to "click." By better understanding your hearing loss, you will gain new insights into why you think people are mumbling, why you "hear" but cannot "understand," why you have difficulty with female voices, and the other questions you have been asking yourself for so long.
- Your family's understanding of your hearing loss. Your family does not know how you hear. What they do know is that you do not hear well! They know they use lots of energy trying to communicate with you. Sometimes, the audiologist will play a recording that simulates your hearing loss so that your family can understand better what you are going through.
- Your hearing aid. What will the my hearing aid do and what will it not do? When you have realistic expectations, it is easier to adjust to your hearing aid. Also, your audiologist should review how to take care of your aid and how to troubleshoot problems, and answer any of your questions. So much information is given to you at the time of the hearing aid fitting that it is difficult to absorb everything. Also, as you use your aid, more questions come to mind.
Many audiologists take this opportunity to review different types of hearing aids and how they work. This helps you to understand why your kind of hearing aid was selected specifically for you.
This review also helps family members understand that your hearing aid was a prescription for you. Often, well-meaning family members and friends keep bringing you ads for other kinds of hearing aids or talk about other friends who have "better" hearing aids because they do not understand that your hearing aid was chosen because it met the needs of your hearing loss and your common communication situations.
- Learning to listen again. Even if you don' t have hearing aids but have discovered that you have a hearing loss, aural rehabilitation services can give you strategies to improve listening and increase your communication effectiveness. If you do have new hearing aids or a cochlear implant, your world will be full of sounds you forgot existed. You will be moving from what has become a quiet world back to the normally noisy world in which we all live. Through training and practice, you will acquire new listening habits.
- Assistive listening devices. A hearing aid won' t wake you up when you are sleeping. A hearing aid won' t help you in a theater. But, there are many other devices that can help TV listening devices, personal FM systems to use in lectures, conference microphones, telephone amplifiers, etc. You can become acquainted with these devices and see how they can improve your social, family, and work life.
- Using visual clues. Everyone uses their eyes to get clues about what people are saying, their mood, their interest in the topic of conversation, etc. You probably are using your eyes even more to make up for what you cannot hear.
Sometimes formal instruction in how speech sounds are made, which sounds look alike on the lips, and how words with the same mouth movement have very different meaning can be incredibly useful in increasing understanding of conversations. You can also gain a great deal of helpful information from following other visual clues like facial expression, gestures, body movement, and body language. For example, if you are not sure what was said, facial expression may help you figure out whether the speaker said "I'm mad" or "I'm sad." Broader observation of factors like the physical environment, the context of the conversation, and the people involved is also helpful in gaining information about what was said or what might likely be said next.
- Handling Conversation. By learning to take charge of your communication assertively (not aggressively!), you can become a more effective communicator. There are may ways to be assertive. You can ask people to get your attention before speaking to you, suggest that they face you, and ask them not to shout. Another way to be assertive is to learn and use strategies to handle communication breakdowns. Know when to ask for a "rephrase" instead of a "repeat", know how to apply a clarification strategy, and learn how to ask questions.
Know how to arrange the environment through positioning yourself and others. For example, if you rely heavily on lipreading and facial expression, ask your communication partner to turn and give you a full face view rather than a profile.
Learn tactics to use in noisy situations, such as restaurants. For example, ask for a seat away from clattering dishes and busy aisles.
And most important, learn how to let your sense of humor be your ally!
- Arrangement of your home. Now that you' ve learned more about your hearing loss, you may want to rearrange your furniture to promote easier conversation (and that full face view mentioned above). You might wish to change lighting so you can better see your conversation partner' s face. Perhaps carpeting can be strategically placed to absorb noise. Maybe there are alerting devices that can help you identify when the doorbell rings.
- Support groups. You are not the only one with hearing loss. Joining a support group will give you the opportunity to learn from others' experiences. How do they handle traveling, meetings, appointments, going to the hospital, telephone conversations, hearing in theaters, difficult family members or work associates. Have they used assistive listening devices? What has worked? Support groups are excellent forums for problem solving and mutual support. They are also good for your sense of humor - an essential ingredient for coping with hearing loss!
There are national support groups for adults with hearing loss with local chapters they include:
For other support groups for adults with hearing loss, click here
Legal support. Today there are laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act that provide for accommodations for people with hearing loss in the workplace and in public meeting places like hospitals, courtrooms, and places of worship.
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