Visalia Hearing Center Provides the Only Aural Rehabilitation Program in Our Community
Communication is a critical part of staying active and connected with the world around you. Those with severe limitations in this area sometimes require a little extra help to avoid being separated and isolated from the rest of the world.
At Visalia Hearing Center, we participate in the 5 Keys Aural Rehabilitation Program as a way of providing the valuable resources of aural rehabilitation to our patients in the region.
What is Aural Rehabilitation?
Aural rehabilitation involves helping those profoundly affected by hearing loss to effectively adjust to and manage their condition.
Aural rehabilitation looks different for everyone, so finding what is right for you requires an honest, transparent discussion with your hearing care provider.
The methods used tend to focus on helping these individuals overcome the daily challenges caused by hearing loss to improve their quality of life and allow them to continue enjoying an active and independent lifestyle.
Five Strategies of Aural Rehabilitation for Adults
Adjusting to and Learning About Your Specific Type of Hearing Loss
This aspect of aural rehabilitation helps you better understand your type of loss and how it affects your functional hearing and communication abilities. It is designed to help relieve frustrations when retraining your brain and helps you explain your challenges to your loved ones and friends as you’re going through the rehabilitation process.
Improving Communication Skills
Since communication is one of the main goals of aural rehabilitation, nonverbal skills are also among the strategies involved, like:
- Learning to read facial expressions and gestures that help provide clues as to what someone is saying
- Lip-reading, which helps differentiate words that have similar mouth movements but different meanings
- Lip-reading, which helps differentiate words that have similar mouth movements but different meanings
How to Use and Make the Most of Your Hearing Aids
The hearing aid you choose should include the best features for you and your lifestyle. Being able to understand how to make the most of those features and the technology that accompanies them helps you get the very best results out of your hearing aids.
Exploring Accessories for Your Hearing Aids
There are certain situations where your hearing aids alone don’t provide the very best results. Most modern hearing aids and assistive listening devices link directly to your phone, TV, and music player using Bluetooth technology. The recent release of AuraCast technology even augments your ability to link directly to public address systems, enhancing your ability to hear in churches, theaters, transportation centers, and other public venues.
Support
Two main kinds of support are available for those with hearing impairment. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) offers accommodations for people with hearing loss in the workplace and other places you frequent (hospitals, churches, and courtrooms). And while friends and family can be supportive, there’s nothing like talking to someone who knows exactly what you’re going through, so support groups provide significant help in meeting the daily challenges associated with living with hearing loss.
Aural Rehabilitation for Children
Identifying hearing loss early on in a child’s life is essential, because their impairment affects their ability to learn speech and language, which has a profound effect on their ability to socialize, especially when it comes to learning.
Aural rehabilitation looks a little bit different for children because it focuses a great deal on development challenges. Consequently, aural rehabilitation for children requires specific habilitative interventional techniques to help them catch up to their normal-hearing peers.
Aural rehabilitation or habilitation for a child depends on factors like the severity of the hearing impairment and the age their hearing loss was discovered, as well as the type of hearing loss involved.
Strategies for children typically include:
- Identifying sounds, being able to tell the difference between sounds, and attaching meaning to sounds.
- Visual cues help improve communication skills. It’s critical to learn what environmental settings are best for your child to socialize or work in and how to effectively manage them to be able to see nonverbal cues.
- Speech improvement, which is necessary to help with pronunciation and enunciation of words that they may not hear correctly, improving their ability to speak and communicate in spite of their hearing challenges.
- Hearing aid care and use, which are an important part of helping your child get the most out of the technology provided to assist with their hearing challenges.
Learn More About Aural Rehabilitation From Visalia Hearing Center
Visalia Hearing Center participates in the 5 Keys Aural Rehabilitation Program in order to provide our patients with the best possible assistance for improving their capacity to communicate.
Contact us to learn more about aural rehabilitation, available support groups in our area, and more using the adjacent form.
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