The School’s special 50th anniversary colloquium series continues on Tuesday 2 April with a talk from SASS PhD candidate, Mr. Ronald Adjekum.
Ronald is a PhD student at the School of Audiology and Speech Sciences at the University of British Columbia. His research is focused on furthering our understanding on how acoustic stimulus parameters are processed from the cochlea up to the brainstem in infants and adults with normal hearing and hearing loss. In addition, Ronald’s research investigates the estimation of physiological thresholds in infants using both air and bone conducted stimuli.
WHEN: Tuesday 2 April, 4pm
WHERE: Friedman Room 355
TITLE: Audiology in developing countries
ABSTRACT: The issues of the developing world have become very important in the field of audiology because of the growing ethnic and racial diversity in developed countries. In addition, there are growing opportunities for audiologists in the developed world to extend hearing health care services to underserved communities across the globe. With the current innovations afforded by the internet and computers, hearing health care services in the form of training, consultation, hearing assessment and fitting of hearing instruments can be extended to underserved communities via telehealth. Consequently, there is a growing need for the audiologist to understand the information about the countries of origin of their patients. This presentation will provide the most current information about hearing healthcare practices in developing countries with particular focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. More specifically, an overview of the prevalence of hearing loss along with the psychosocial, cultural and economic factors affecting hearing health care services in Sub-Saharan Africa will be described. The presentation will demonstrate the state of infant hearing screening in developing countries and discuss how it can be successfully implemented in these countries. In addition, the presentation will examine affordable and sustainable models of providing hearing health care in developing countries, the problems facing diagnostic audiology services, communication of results, and rehabilitation of hearing loss.