Provides conceptual and technical background for students and practicing audiologists, as well as manufacturers, product designers, and consumers. Discusses the impact of the American with Disabilities Act and the involvement of the FDA with assistive devices. Explains assistive devices' interface w

Millions of Americans experience some degree of hearing loss. The Social Security Administration (SSA) operates programs that provide cash disability benefits to people with permanent impairments like hearing loss, if they can show that their impairments meet stringent SSA criteria and their earnings are below an SSA threshold. The National Research Council convened an expert committee at the request of the SSA to study the issues related to disability determination for people with hearing loss. This volume is the product of that study. Hearing Loss: Determining Eligibility for Social Security Benefits reviews current knowledge about hearing loss and its measurement and treatment, and provides an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the current processes and criteria. It recommends changes to strengthen the disability determination process and ensure its reliability and fairness. The book addresses criteria for selection of pure tone and speech tests, guidelines for test administration, testing of hearing in noise, special issues related to testing children, and the difficulty of predicting work capacity from clinical hearing test results. It should be useful to audiologists, otolaryngologists, disability advocates, and others who are concerned with people who have hearing loss.

Hearing loss doesn’t come with an operating manual—until now. If you have hearing loss, you already know that the conventional approach to treatment is focused on hearing-aid technology. Without a handbook to help you figure out how to actually live with it, you’ve likely been getting by on information pieced together from various sources—and yet, communication often seems incomplete and unsatisfying. What’s missing from this hearing care model is the big picture—a real-life illustration of how hearing loss, its emotions, and its barriers affect every corner of your life. Now, hearing-health advocates, consultants, and speakers Shari Eberts and Gael Hannan offer a new skills-based approach to hearing loss that is centered not on hearing better, but on communicating better. With honesty and humor, they share their own hearing loss journeys, and outline invaluable insights, strategies, and workarounds to help you engage with the world and be heard. You’ll gain tips for navigating all areas impacted by hearing loss, including relationships, work, technology; strategies for adopting a new, empowering mindset towards your hearing loss; and communication behaviors that can make almost any listening situation manageable. Informed by the lived experiences of thousands of people living with hearing loss, and corroborated by hearing science, technological advances, and modern hearing-care principles, Hear & Beyond offers a new way forward to greater connection and engagement—whether you’re new to hearing loss or have been living with it for a long time. Hearing loss is just one aspect of who you are, among many others. You may have hearing loss, but it doesn’t have to have you.

- Speech Generation: Acoustics, Models and Applications (Arild Lacroix). - The Evolution of Digital Audio Technology (John Mourjopoulos). - Audio-Visual Interaction (Armin Kohlrausch) . - Speech and Audio Coding (Ulrich Heute) . - Binaural Technique (Dorte Hammerhoei, Henrik Moeller). - Auditory Virtual Environment (Pedro Novo). - Evolutionary Adaptions for Auditory Communication (Georg Klump). - A Functional View on the Human Hearing Organ (Herbert Hudde). - Modeling of Binaural Hearing (Jonas Braasch). - Psychoacoustics and Sound Quality (Hugo Fastl). - Semiotics for Engineers (Ute Jekosch). - Quality of Transmitted Speech for Humans and Machines (Sebastian Möller).