Remote microphone systems for preschool-age children who are hard of hearing: access and utilization

Abstract

Objectives: Children who are hard of hearing (CHH) have restricted access to auditory-linguistic information. Remote-microphone (RM) systems reduce the negative consequences of limited auditory access. The purpose of this study was to characterise receipt and use of RM systems in young CHH in home and school settings.

Design: Through a combination of parent, teacher, and audiologist report, we identified children who received RM systems for home and/or school use by 4 years of age or younger. With cross-sectional surveys, parents estimated the amount of time the child used RM systems at home and school per day.

Study Sample: The participants included 217 CHH.

Results: Thirty-six percent of the children had personal RMs for home use and 50% had RM systems for school. Approximately, half of the parents reported that their children used RM systems for home use for 1–2 hours per use and RM systems for school use for 2-4 hours per day.

Conclusions: Results indicated that the majority of the CHH in the current study did not receive RM systems for home use in early childhood, but half had access to RM technology in the educational setting. High-quality research studies are needed to determine ways in which RM systems benefit pre-school-age CHH.

Keywords:

• Remote microphones
• paediatrics
• assistive technology
• newborn hearing screening

Acknowledgements

The content of this project is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders or the National Institutes of Health. The following people provided support, assistance and feedback at various points in the project: Dawna Lewis, Mary Pat Moeller, J. Bruce Tomblin, Ryan McCreery, Jacob Oleson, Wendy Fick and Marlea O’Brien. Special thanks go to the families and children who participated in the research and to the examiners at the University of Iowa, Boys Town National Research Hospital and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The authors had full editorial control of this work and manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Notes

1 Additional forms of wireless connectivity include infrared and Bluetooth technology (Atcherson, Childress, and Kennett 2016). For the purposes of the current article, we will focus on the use of RM systems that utilize frequency modulation or digital modulation to transmit the signal to a listener.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Institutes of Health [Grants NIH/NIDCD 5R01DC009560] (co-principal investigators, J. Bruce Tomblin, University of Iowa and Mary Pat Moeller, Boys Town National Research Hospital) and [5R01DC013591] (principal investigator, Ryan W. McCreery, Boys Town National Research Hospital).