Hearing Instrument Technology for the Hearing Healthcare Professional, 2E brings together modern material for the highly specialized are of hearing instrument acousticians in hearing instrument technology. Beginning with an overview of hearing instrument technology from the beginning to the "digital" era, the text covers hearing instrument types and statistics on these instruments, hearing instrument measurements, transducers, acoustic modifications, hearing instrument functions, accessories, and troubleshooting, digital hearing instruments, and audiological background.

The loss of hearing - be it gradual or acute, mild or severe, present since birth or acquired in older age - can have significant effects on one's communication abilities, quality of life, social participation, and health. Despite this, many people with hearing loss do not seek or receive hearing health care. The reasons are numerous, complex, and often interconnected. For some, hearing health care is not affordable. For others, the appropriate services are difficult to access, or individuals do not know how or where to access them. Others may not want to deal with the stigma that they and society may associate with needing hearing health care and obtaining that care. Still others do not recognize they need hearing health care, as hearing loss is an invisible health condition that often worsens gradually over time. In the United States, an estimated 30 million individuals (12.7 percent of Americans ages 12 years or older) have hearing loss. Globally, hearing loss has been identified as the fifth leading cause of years lived with disability. Successful hearing health care enables individuals with hearing loss to have the freedom to communicate in their environments in ways that are culturally appropriate and that preserve their dignity and function. Hearing Health Care for Adults focuses on improving the accessibility and affordability of hearing health care for adults of all ages. This study examines the hearing health care system, with a focus on non-surgical technologies and services, and offers recommendations for improving access to, the affordability of, and the quality of hearing health care for adults of all ages.

Covers the fundamentals of hearing instrument history and technology. Includes recent advances and trends and expanded coverage of digital hearing aids and FM systems. Halftone illustrations.

Of the more than 400 studies presented at the 18th International Congress on Education of the Deaf, the 20 most incisive papers were selected, rewritten, and edited to construct the trenchant volume Issues Unresolved: New Perspectives on Language and Deaf Education. The resulting book provocatively challenges the invested reader in four critical areas of deaf education worldwide. Part 1, Communication: Signed and Spoken Languages, addresses matters that range from considering critical periods for language acquisition, researched by Susan D. Fischer, to assessing the impact of immigration policies on the ethnic composition of Australia's deaf community, intriguing work by Jan Branson and Don Miller. Part 2, Communication: Accessibility to Speech, continues the debate with works on the perception of speech by deaf and hard of hearing children, contributed by Arthur Boothroyd, and automatic speech recognition and its applications, delineated by Harry Levitt. Educational issues are brought to the forefront in Part 3 in such engrossing studies as Lea Lurie and Alex Kozulin's discourse on the application of an instrumental-enrichment cognitive intervention program with deaf immigrant children from Ethiopia. Stephen Powers offers another perspective in this section with his retrospective evaluation of a distance education training course for teachers of the deaf. Part 4, Psychological and Social Adjustment reviews progress in this area, with Anne de Klerk's exposition on the Rotterdam Deaf Awareness Program, and Corinne J. Lewkowitz and Lynn S. Liben's research on the development of deaf and hearing children's sex-role attitudes and self-endorsements. These and the many other contributions by renowned international scholars in the field make Issues Unresolved a compelling new standard for all involved in deaf education.

The U.S. Census Bureau has reported that 56.7 million Americans had some type of disability in 2010, which represents 18.7 percent of the civilian noninstitutionalized population included in the 2010 Survey of Income and Program Participation. The U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) provides disability benefits through the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program and the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. As of December 2015, approximately 11 million individuals were SSDI beneficiaries, and about 8 million were SSI beneficiaries. SSA currently considers assistive devices in the nonmedical and medical areas of its program guidelines. During determinations of substantial gainful activity and income eligibility for SSI benefits, the reasonable cost of items, devices, or services applicants need to enable them to work with their impairment is subtracted from eligible earnings, even if those items or services are used for activities of daily living in addition to work. In addition, SSA considers assistive devices in its medical disability determination process and assessment of work capacity. The Promise of Assistive Technology to Enhance Activity and Work Participation provides an analysis of selected assistive products and technologies, including wheeled and seated mobility devices, upper-extremity prostheses, and products and technologies selected by the committee that pertain to hearing and to communication and speech in adults.

Hearing aid technology changes at a rapid pace. For speech-language pathologists who work with individuals using hearing instruments, keeping up with the new technology can be challenging, and sometimes even intimidating. Hearing Aids for Speech-Language Pathologists is designed to remove the mystery and the confusing high-tech terms of the many hearing aid algorithms and features, by simply laying out the need-to-know aspects in an organized, easy to read and understand manner. The core of this text focuses on how modern hearing aids work, and the tests associated with the fitting of these instruments. Attention is given to both the school age and adult hearing aid user. Recent developments such as situation detection, rechargeability and wireless connectivity are reviewed in detail, as well as the popular use of smartphone apps to allow the user to control the processing. Amplification is not just hearing aids, and therefore chapters also have been dedicated to implantable amplification strategies, FM and Bluetooth solutions. Hearing aid fitting cannot be studied in isolation, but rather, how it fits into the complete treatment of the patient with hearing loss, including the audiologic rehabilitative process. For this reason, the beginning chapters of the book are devoted to a review of the basics of the modern audiologic evaluation and the associated auditory pathologies. Readers will also find portions of the book that address hearing screening in the schools, rehabilitative techniques and auditory training. Practicing speech-language pathologists and graduate students will find that this text provides the latest in concise and practical information in the areas of hearing aids and rehabilitative audiology. Hearing Aids for Speech-Language Pathologists is authored by two of the industry's leading authorities on adult amplification, who have carefully crafted a text that provides speech-language pathologists with the essential information to work comfortably with hearing instruments and their accessories for individuals of all ages.