HearApp vs INCLUDE Audio

HearApp helps people with listening challenges learn to hear better. It's the perfect exercise plan for children and adults with hearing loss looking to achieve optimal hearing. Rooted in research and praised by users and audiologists alike, the app is fun, effective, affordable, and easy to use—at home or in clinic. How it works: HearApp takes you through a series of auditory exercises. You'll practice identifying and discriminating words and phrases in quiet and with background noise. A pre-test places you or your child at the appropriate practice level. Visual prompts, repetition, and other listening helpers provide support along the way. Your progress is saved automatically and used by HearApp to personalize your listening sessions. Our goal: HearApp is the result of several years of hearing research by BioSpeech, Inc., a biomedical research company located in Portland, Oregon, specializing in speech and hearing technology. The goal of HearApp is to build the listening skills of individuals with hearing loss, so that they can comprehend the language in their environment. With HearApp, individuals with hearing loss can begin to discriminate and identify the speech sounds in the spoken language around them. Background: In the United States, there are roughly 35 million individuals with some degree of hearing loss. Of these people, around 10 million have hearing aids and 67,000 have cochlear implants. Intensive auditory rehabilitation training is needed to fully realize the potential benefit of these devices and fully hear and understand speech. Face-to-face training with a specialist is expensive and not always accessible. HearApp aims to make auditory rehabilitation training more accessible for children and adults alike.

Project INCLUDE is an NIH-funded grant awarded to our team to characterize the hearing abilities of individuals with Down syndrome and identify factors that may improve speech recognition in challenging environments. Did you know that hearing loss is a common occurrence for individuals with Down syndrome? Some estimates suggest as many as 50 to 80% of individuals with Down syndrome experience hearing loss. The majority of these hearing losses are due to fluid or infection in the middle ear. However, individuals with Down syndrome also have higher rates of permanent hearing loss than individuals without Down syndrome. Whether permanent or temporary, hearing loss can result in less overall language exposure, language delays, difficulty hearing in background noise, and reduced ability to orient to sounds in the environment. A major aim of Project INCLUDE is to determine what skills are important for successful listening in background noise for individuals with Down syndrome. Our goal is to help families, teachers, and therapists prepare individuals with Down syndrome to reach their full potential.