Hearing Impairment and Disability: Identification, Assessment and Intervention

Much research has been conducted to provide researchers and hearing healthcare professionals with updated information in regard to hearing assessments, results interpretation and case management. This ongoing research is particularly imperative to guide clinicians with optimized methods in assessing and managing pediatric patients with hearing impairment and disability. As such, tremendous research efforts have been made in determining the most optimum methods in assessing hearing using both subjective and objective tests. Since hearing loss can occur due to disrupted peripheral and/or central auditory pathway, there is also a growing interest to study children with auditory processing disorder (APD). Even though notable achievements have been observed in understanding APD, more research is required, particularly in establishing a gold standard APD test and its specific interventions. Aditionally, having an objective test such as speech-evoked auditory brainstem response is beneficial to understand how speech sounds are encoded within the brainstem region in hearing-impaired children, as well as in those with compromised neural function. In this book, we have gathered research from Malaysia and India in this field and hope it will be of interest to our readers.