Hearing Loss simulator

{ February 15, 2011 @ 10:26 pm } · { Uncategorized }

I had the opportunity recently to experience a hearing loss simulator online.  The simulators let you experience numerous situations of audio processing in 3 different forms of hearing: normal, mild and moderate. I explored some single sound clips, such as a duck quacking.  The sound of the quack progressively got queiter, but you could still make out the noise.  The more interesting situations were ones that involed loud background noise.  There is a clip of a stadium full of people, and as the hearing loss got more and more severe, the sound became more of a blurr, as well as a headache. The sound of peoples voices quickly turned to murmurs and noises blended together.  Another situation that stood out to me was a 2 person dialogue at a resturant.  In this situation, there was very mild background noise, but still had a huge impact on the moderate level hearing loss person.  The slight sound of background noise effected their ability to focus on the other persons voice.  As I completed this simulator, I began thinking about how this type of disability does not just happen to elderly people.  I have students in my special education classes that have auditory processing issues.  This made the experience even more interesting as I began to imagine my students trying to focus on my voice at 7:30 AM, and how annoying it must be!  Thank god the self-contained setting allows for smaller ratio of student-to-teacher…otherwise there might be a bigger problem!

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