More than 10 percent of babies born with an infection called Cytomegalovirus will suffer permanent hearing loss, a new study reports.

Link: http://www.health24.com/Medical/Hearing-management/Hearing-in-children/10-of-kids-with-Cytomegalovirus-may-end-up-deaf-20141028

Blasco and Redleaf (2014) note that otologists around the world have used cochlear implants (CIs) as an effective therapy for people presenting with severe-to-profound sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL) even though the contralateral ear presents with normal hearing. Blasco and Redleaf report that more traditional therapies such as bone-anchored devices and contralateral routing of signal (CROS) provide only minimal benefit for users and those users do worse in noisy backgrounds. 

Link: http://www.audiology.org/news/cochlear-implantation-normal-hearing-contralateral-ear

If you don’t regularly work with sign language interpreters, you might not know that there are certain rules and expectations. To get the most out of having an ASL interpreter present, it’s a good idea to educate yourself about what exactly an interpreter does and how they facilitate communication.

Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lydia-l-callis/working-with-a-sign-langu_1_b_5909288.html?utm_hp_ref=business&ir=Business

Presented by: Katherine Christensen, MS, Instructional Technology

When: November 13, 2014 at 1:30-3:00 ET/12:30 – 2:00 CT/11:30—1:00pm MT/10:30-12:00 PT

Where: Adobe Connect, Click here to Register Online

Who: EHDI Coordinators and administrators who make decisions on EHDI state websites

State EHDI websites are an effective and important tool to support your program’s mission and provide access to information about the EHDI process. Understanding terminology and components of a website help you make informed decisions about your site.

Please join us to learn more about the website improvement process.

If you have questions you would like answered during the webinar, please take a moment to fill out the Discussion Points Survey to be answered by all participants.

If you would like to share what you have done to improve your state’s EHDI website, please take a moment to fill out the Improving an EHDI Website Survey.

Live captioning will be available for this webinar

If you have questions about this webinar, please contact Derek Saunders at derek.saunders@usu.edu

Link: http://www.infanthearing.org/resources_home/events/website-improvement-webinar.html

For more than 35 years ear specialist and surgeon Dr. Ronald Hoffman has searched for new treatments and devices to help hearing-impaired children. But no matter how impressive the newest hearing aids or cochlear implants were, Hoffman said he’s seen many children bullied for being different.

“One of the moms told us that her son had taken [his hearing aids] and buried them in the sand,” Hoffman said.

Link: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/hearing-impaired-kids-superhero/story?id=26297293

Erin Moriarty Harrelson, a PhD candidate in anthropology at American University, is one of five grantees selected from among 864 applicants for a Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship, which is the first of its kind. Moriarty Harrelson will travel throughout Cambodia for nine months, exploring the emergence of a post-Khmer Rouge deaf culture. She herself is deaf and will use video, text, photographs, maps, and drawings to document the lives of deaf Cambodians as they encounter each other for the first time and learn Cambodian Sign Language—a language that is still being developed and documented.

Read more about her experience at the link below.

Link: http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2014/10/15/erin-moriarty-harrelson-documenting-the-deaf-experience-in-cambodia/

Forbes Hospital in Monroeville recently starting utilizing iPad-based software called “Language You See,” which provides interpretational and sign language services at the touch of a button.

Link: http://wesa.fm/post/forbes-hospital-using-new-software-bridge-language-barriers

Georgia Tech researchers have come up with an app that turns Google Glass into a real-time closed-captioning display for the hearing-impaired, using the voice recognition in the user’s Glass-paired smartphone. 

Link: http://gizmodo.com/google-glass-app-gives-conversations-real-time-closed-c-1642537840

Find implementation information and resources at the link below.

Link: http://www.medicalhomeinfo.org/about/newsletter/index.aspx

Last year we saw quite a bit of buzz around the 3D printed human ears that several researchers had been able to create. We even saw an artist 3D print a replica of Vincent van Gogh’s severed ear, which used one of his relative’s actual DNA.

Every year thousands of children worldwide, are born with a condition known as microtia. Microtia is a congenital deformity of the external ear, where it fails to fully develop.

Read more at the link below.

Link: http://3dprint.com/17913/3d-print-ear-clinical-trials/