19th ANNUAL EARLY HEARING DETECTION & INTERVENTION MEETING
March 8-10, 2020 • Kansas City, MO
Smart Pacifier measure of sucking behavior for Behavioral Observation Audiometry
There is a lack of objective behavioral assessments of hearing before children have the motor and cognitive ability to perform Visual Reinforcement Audiometry (VRA). While diagnostic assessments with Auditory Brainstem Response (ABR) and Otoacoustic Emmissions (OAE) is sufficient to assess most cases of hearing loss, there are still gaps in assessing hearing for auditory neuropathy and aided hearing. There are strategies to observe an infant’s change in sucking behavior in response to a sound before VRA with Behavioral Observation Audiometry (BOA) however this paradigm has been limited by the difficulty in observing sucking behavior, variation between infants, and habituation to sounds. Researchers in baby labs have addressed some of these issues by wiring up a pacifier for more objective measures of sucking behavior for paradigms such as High Amplitude Sucking (HAS) paradigm for studies of infant responses to spoken language. For this study, our team has created a low-cost version of the equipment used for the HAS studies and evaluated if it can be applied to audiology to improve the BOA for assessments of hearing in infants. To do this, we have prototyped a smart pacifier device that measures infant sucking behavior in response to sound and conducted a pilot study in typically developing infants. The study evaluates the psychometrics of the infant’s sucking behavior to sound to evaluate the feasibility of using this method to improve the assessment of hearing in auditory neuropathy and aided hearing.
- Benefits and challenges of behavioral assessments
- Benefits and challenges of sucking behavior
- Opportunities and technologies from research in developmental psychology
Poster:
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Presenter: Carly Kiselycznyk
Dr. Carly Kiselycznyk, PhD was trained in behavioral neuroscience at the NIH, Karolinska Institute, and Yale University. She is the founder of BrainChild Technologies and has served as the principal investigator on NSF- and NIH-funded grants related to this technology.
ASHA DISCLOSURE:
Financial -
• Receives Salary,Intellectual property rights,Ownership interest,Hold patent on equipment for Employment,Management position,Ownership from BrainChild Technologies.
Nonfinancial -
No relevant nonfinancial relationship exist.