This webinar will be of interest to specialist teachers (ToDs), school support staff, class teachers, early years practitioners, ALN/SENDCo type roles, audiologists, speech and language therapists.

Of all the children who are deaf across the world fewer than 10% are wearing a hearing aid of any kind. Research in Cambridge has been searching for an affordable solution for the most common type of hearing loss in childhood affecting the middle ear: glue ear.

Children have small anatomy and after a cough, cold or ear infection can suffer with fluid build up behind the ear drum affecting the transfer of sound. The hearing aids that work well for this condition transfer sound using bone conduction technology which can be expensive, up to £3000. A solution costing ~£50 for a headset (which aims to be available to the public later in 2021) has been trialled, with the help of the Cambridge charity -The Raspberry Pi Foundation - as well as a free app called Hear Glue Ear (available now on google and android app stores) which aims to prevent children falling behind while they have glue ear, and help home management between appointments. This solution was researched during the Covid pandemic in 2020 when children were unable to access hearing services or grommet operations, where the whole headset, microphone and app was sent by post to families who were then able to manage their child’s condition at home by using the app to check hearing and then using the headset to support hearing loss.

The research has been submitted for journal peer review but has not yet been published. In the meantime due to its relevance to Covid it has been published on the preprint server Medrixiv and European PubMed https://medrxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2021.01.21.21249496v1

Presenters:

Dr Tamsin Holland Brown, Community Paediatrician

Dr Juan Mora, Consultant Audiovestibular Physician

Date: Monday, 4th October 2021

Time: 4.30 pm - 6 pm

Cost: Free

Online Platform: Zoom

Closing date: 30/9/2021

Please note that for this event you will have to provide your own additional support through access to work. Captioning may be possible. If any of this applies to you, please get in touch by sending an email to sscsec@ed.ac.uk so we can facilitate and provide access.

Registrations are closed

Introduction to the HearGlue Ear resource