Philip Reed, Joseph Paul Nemargut, Judith E Goldstein, Coral E Dirks, Yingzi Xiong
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Individuals with dual sensory impairment (DSI) often have reduced independence in their daily activities. Vision impairment is consistently reported to play a more dominant role than hearing impairment on home-based daily living, while little is known regarding the relative impact of vision and hearing impairments on tasks such as independent travel that require interacting with more complex environments. To address this knowledge gap, we administered a semistructured survey in a convenience sample of 161 individuals with normal vision, low vision, or blindness, with or without hearing impairment. A combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches was used to analyze the data. Compared to normal vision, low vision and blind participants were significantly less likely to be frequent travelers. Low vision participants reported that vision impairment had a greater impact than hearing impairment on their travel independence, while blind participants reported hearing impairment to have a greater impact than blindness on their travel independence. The unique challenges in blind individuals were highlighted by their concerns on localizing dynamic sounds such as traffic during travel. Seventy percent of the hearing-impaired participants wore hearing aids and reported high utility for speech perception, but there was a significant reduction in the utility of hearing aids for sound localization especially for the blind participants. Our results reveal the interaction between vision and hearing impairments on independent travel and emphasize the need for an integrated rehabilitation approach for this population.
Trends in HearingAUDIOLOGY & SPEECH-LANGUAGE PATHOLOGYOTORH-OTORHINOLARYNGOLOGY
CiteScore
4.50
自引率
11.10%
发文量
44
审稿时长
12 weeks
期刊介绍:
Trends in Hearing is an open access journal completely dedicated to publishing original research and reviews focusing on human hearing, hearing loss, hearing aids, auditory implants, and aural rehabilitation. Under its former name, Trends in Amplification, the journal established itself as a forum for concise explorations of all areas of translational hearing research by leaders in the field. Trends in Hearing has now expanded its focus to include original research articles, with the goal of becoming the premier venue for research related to human hearing and hearing loss.