Aural Rehabilitation

Aural rehabilitation (AR) is the process of managing hearing loss after being fitted with hearing aids. This process can begin even prior to hearing aid fitting. AR is one of the most essential components of hearing aid fitting as its primary goal is to maximize benefit from amplification devices.

Components of Aural Rehabilitation

Aural rehabilitation process involves the following aspects and the mode of delivery varies from individual to individual.

Acquiring Knowledge About Your Hearing Loss

Although one can never really ascertain the root cause of hearing loss, its nature and type can indicate the potential cause. This information can indicate how it affects your functional hearing and communication abilities. This will not only help relieve frustration when retraining your brain, but it also helps you explain to your loved ones and friends what you go through.

Retraining Your Brain With Auditory Training Activities

Your hearing aids allow you to hear sounds you may not have heard in a very long time. It takes time for your brain to get used to those sounds, and aural rehabilitation services offer you strategies to help with this. This is like a physiotherapy for ears where you are training your ears to hear every sound better.

Improving Communication Skills

Improving communication skills, both verbal and nonverbal is one of the goals of AR. You can also learn to use visual cues. Normal human communication is a combination of verbal communication, facial expressions, and gestures. Lipreading is also an aspect of human communication that cannot be eliminated. It helps you understand what sounds look like when people say them. differentiate words that have similar mouth movements but different meanings. Once listening improves with training, reliance on reading lips is reduced. The goal is not to eliminate reading lips and get meaning through facial gestures but to improve ability to utilize hearing functions.

How to Use and Derive Maximum Benefit From Your Hearing Aids

Your hearing aid was chosen by you and your provider because it offers the best features for you and your lifestyle. Understanding exactly what your technology is designed to do (and not to do) will help you get the most out of it. Using hearing technology does not mean everything is fixed, so having realistic expectations from your devices will help you adjust more successfully to them. Being able to take care of them to help the aids last longer is also a key factor to successfully obtain the full worth for your investment.

Exploring Accessories For Your Hearing Aids

With technological advancements in hearing aids also come an array of possible accessories! Assistive listening devices that connect to your phone, TV, and music players are just some of the integrable options to accompany your hearing aid technology. We encourage all hearing aid users to discuss augmented technologies with our audiologist during follow-up appointments and when you feel you need additional assistance with your hearing aids.

Assistive Listening Devices

These are devices that enhance listening in different and complex listening conditions. AR focuses on using these devices such as an alarm, amplified stethoscope, smoke alarm etc., effectively.

Self Advocacy and Frequent Communication Partner Training

Advocating for your hearing loss is essential to help you communicate effectively in different situations. Most often, many patients with hearing loss fail to let their work colleagues know about their hearing loss and suffer in silence fearing they might lose their job or made fun of. Informing them can be much more beneficial in receiving some accommodations that you may be entitled to and receive the help you need. Letting others know prior to speaking can help with receiving adequate help. It is also important for frequent communication partners to know how to communicate with the person with hearing difficulty.

We hope you will make these aural rehabilitation exercises a permanent part of your hearing health routine in conjunction with the use of your hearing devices. General research indicates that most individuals peak in their discrimination abilities around four months of daily rehabilitation exercises. So don't stop, just take it a day at a time!