Hearing loss affects 31 million Americans, particularly veterans who were exposed to harmful levels of noise during military functions. Many veterans also receive treatment with ototoxic medications, which may exacerbate preexisting hearing loss. Thus, hearing loss is the most common and tinnitus the third most common service-connected disability among veterans. Poor implementation of hearing protection programs and a lack of audiometric testing during medical treatment leave veterans vulnerable to unrecognized and untreated hearing loss until speech communication is impaired. Individualized audiometric testing techniques, including assessment of high frequencies, can be used in clinical and occupational settings to detect early hearing loss. Antioxidants also may alleviate cochlear damage caused by noise and ototoxicity. Ultimately, hearing loss prevention requires education on reducing occupational and recreational noise exposure and counseling on the risks and options available to patients. Technological advances will improve monitoring, allow better noise engineering controls, and lead to more effective hearing protection.
One of the purposes of a fully anechoic chamber is to provide a very quiet, near-echo-free environment simulating free-field acoustical conditions. From design specification to completion, installation of a fully anechoic chamber can be an enormous undertaking as compared to installation of conventional sound-attenuated acoustical test rooms, which generally are smaller in physical size and have less stringent sound attenuation requirements. The authors had the opportunity to specify the requirements and oversee the installation of a fully anechoic chamber designed to support near-full-frequency, human-hearing range acoustical experiments at the VA National Center for Rehabilitative Auditory Research (NCRAR), located in Portland, OR, USA. Design and installation of NCRAR’s chamber to support entry at laboratory floor level was complicated by the job site location, a subterranean area beneath a structure that accommodates clinical and research offices on the upper floors, and serves as a parking garage on the lower floors. In addition to ambient noise considerations, existing architectural restrictions included parking traffic patterns, below-grade earthquake beams, limited overhead clearance, ground water seepage, and storm water flow patterns. The purpose of this paper is to share pictorial-illustrated experiential results on specification, design, installation, and chamber operation as well as architectural considerations, site preparation, and construction detail.
Clinicians and patients need mobile tools to detect ototoxic change early and prevent hearing loss. We report on the development of an upgrade of our existing desktop-based clinical-audiological instrumentation into a mobile instrument platform which efficiently supports personalized ototoxicity monitoring on the hospital wards as well as clinic by a trained clinician. Our new wireless-enabled system also serves as the instrumentation platform for the next phase of our work which is remote healthcare delivery with patient-guided at-home ototoxicity monitoring using an evidence-based individualized SRO protocol.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.