• Health Policy and Management
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.162-167
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• 2018

Background: In this research, we conducted an analysis to grasp the relationship between hearing and quality of life and to prepare effective troubleshooting. Methods: In this study, we analyzed using the data of the 6th term of the National Health and Nutrition Survey of the Disease Management Headquarters. And, out of 7,380 people, 3,598 adults over the age of 40 years who participated in the hearing test were selected as final research subjects and analyzed. Results: It was confirmed that the result of the analysis affects the quality of life based on hearing. The quality of life associated with hearing loss was unpleasant, motor ability, anxiety/depression, and everyday life affected in order of self management. And factors having an effect on the quality of life of the study subjects were found to be gender, elderly, unmarried, low hearing, low household income, absence of economic activity, and low teaching standards. Conclusion: The conclusion is that strengthening education for realistic management and prevention rather than treatment for unconditional hearing impairment will overcome low self esteem and loneliness and alleviate any uncomfortable life that people with hearing loss give. It is expected to be possible.

• Journal of Audiology & Otology
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.189-198
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• 2021

Background and Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the occupational performance of Korean workers with and without hearing loss and analyze the hearing-related difficulties in the working environment. Subjects and Methods: The Amsterdam checklist for hearing and work was used for the analyses and the occupational environments of the Korean workers were investigated. Out of 129 total participants, 86 workers experienced severe to profound hearing loss and 43 had the normal hearing ability. The hearing-impaired workers were recruited from two leading vocational centers and normal-hearing workers were their colleagues. Results: The hearing-impaired workers were found to take fewer sick leaves and exhibited higher rates of permanent job statuses compared to the normal-hearing workers. Workers with hearing loss rarely detected background sound; however, they could perceive reverberation more frequently. They felt more satisfied with their careers than the normal hearing workers as they received social support and needed to put their effort into hearing for most hearing activities. Furthermore, the effort in hearing increased with the increase in job demand, job control, social support, and career satisfaction. The working hours per week increased with the increase in age, education level, job demand, job control, and social support. Different trends were observed in 9 out of 12 variables while comparing the data from the present study with that obtained from the hearing-impaired workers of the Netherlands, indicating a large difference between countries. Conclusions: Although the hearing-impaired Korean workers operate diligently with good job positions, it is necessary to enhance their acoustic environment and provide them social support. Considering the cultural background of the hearing-impaired workers, the development of suitable vocational rehabilitation programs and specific questionnaires is strongly recommended worldwide.

• Korean Journal of Audiology
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.189-199
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• 2021

Background and Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the occupational performance of Korean workers with and without hearing loss and analyze the hearing-related difficulties in the working environment. Subjects and Methods: The Amsterdam checklist for hearing and work was used for the analyses and the occupational environments of the Korean workers were investigated. Out of 129 total participants, 86 workers experienced severe to profound hearing loss and 43 had the normal hearing ability. The hearing-impaired workers were recruited from two leading vocational centers and normal-hearing workers were their colleagues. Results: The hearing-impaired workers were found to take fewer sick leaves and exhibited higher rates of permanent job statuses compared to the normal-hearing workers. Workers with hearing loss rarely detected background sound; however, they could perceive reverberation more frequently. They felt more satisfied with their careers than the normal hearing workers as they received social support and needed to put their effort into hearing for most hearing activities. Furthermore, the effort in hearing increased with the increase in job demand, job control, social support, and career satisfaction. The working hours per week increased with the increase in age, education level, job demand, job control, and social support. Different trends were observed in 9 out of 12 variables while comparing the data from the present study with that obtained from the hearing-impaired workers of the Netherlands, indicating a large difference between countries. Conclusions: Although the hearing-impaired Korean workers operate diligently with good job positions, it is necessary to enhance their acoustic environment and provide them social support. Considering the cultural background of the hearing-impaired workers, the development of suitable vocational rehabilitation programs and specific questionnaires is strongly recommended worldwide.

• Journal of Korean society of Dental Hygiene
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.11-17
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• 2015

Objectives: The purpose of the study is to investigate the relationship between noise awareness, hearing ability, and dental hygiene performance in dental hygienists. Methods: The subjects were 234 dental hygienists in Seoul, Gyeonggi-do, and Incheon. The questionnaire consisted of 3 questions of general characteristics of the subjects, 1 question of noise awareness, 3 questions of hearing ability, 5 questions of dental hygiene performance, 1 question of noise reduction necessity, and 2 questions of noise control. Noise awareness, dental hygiene performance, and noise reduction necessity were measured by Likert 5 scale. Cronbach's alpha was 0.825 in dental hygiene performance reliability. Results: There was a significant difference in noise recognition by age(p<0.01) and working career(p<0.05). Those who pumped up the higher TV volume accounted for 31.6% and 3.0% had hearing impairment in the regular health checkup. 3.4% of the respondents complained of hearing loss, ear fluid, and equilibrium problem diagnosed by the doctors. The relationship between the type of workplace environment and task performance showed a significant difference. Those who work in the dental hospitals had high score of 3.43, while those who work in dental clinics had 3.20(p<0.05). The increased level of noise recognition affected the task performance and it is necessary to reduce the noise level. More try must be focused on the noise exposure prevention. Conclusions: In order to reduce the problems due to noise and improve their quality of life, it is necessary to change the noise recognition in the work place.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.732-743
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• 2007

Background noise is one of the major complaints of not only hearing impaired persons but also normal listeners. This paper describes the results of two experiments in which speech recognition performance was determined for listeners with normal hearing and sensorineural hearing loss in noise environment. First, we compared speech enhancement algorithms by evaluation speech recognition ability in various speech-to-noise ratios and types of noise. Next, speech enhancement algorithms by reducing background noise were presented and evaluated to improve speech intelligibility for sensorineural hearing impairment listeners. We tested three noise reduction methods using single-microphone, such as spectrum subtraction and companding, Wiener filter method, and maximum likelihood envelop estimation. Their responses in background noise were investigated and compared with those by the speech enhancement algorithm that presented in this paper. The methods improved speech recognition test score for the sensorineural hearing impaired listeners, but not for normal listeners. The results suggest the speech enhancement algorithm with the loudness compression can improve speech intelligibility for listeners with sensorineural hearing loss.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.155-167
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• 2006

Hearing impairment children possess poor underlying perceptual knowledge of the sound system and show delayed development of segmental organization of that system. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between phonological awareness ability and word identification ability in hearing impaired children. 14 children with moderately severe hearing loss participated in this study. All tasks were individually administered. Phonological awareness tests consisted of syllable blending, syllable segmentation, syllable deletion, body-coda discrimination, phoneme blending, phoneme segmentation and phoneme deletion. Close-set Monosyllabic Words(12 items) and lists 1 and 2 of open-set Monosyllabic Words in EARS-K were examined for word identification. Results of this study were as follows: First, from the phonological awareness task, the close-set word identification showed a high positive correlation with the coda discrimination, phoneme blending and phoneme deletion. The open-set word identification showed a high positive correlation with phoneme blending, phoneme deletion and phoneme segmentation. Second, from the level of phonological awareness, the close-set word identification showed a high positive correlation with the level of body-coda awareness and phoneme awareness while the open-set word identification showed a high positive correlation only with the level of phoneme awareness.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.457-466
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• 1997

We developed a new hearing aid telephone which helps the hearing impaired person to improve the listening ability of telephone speech. Recently, the hearing impaired person and the elderly who has hearing loss have been continuously increased and their desire for participating society as a producer has been increased also. So they strong1y want the hearing aid devices which make compensation fortheir handicap. The hearing aid telephone is one of the basic aid devices that helps the hearing impaired to communicate well with other poeple and to acquire easily useful information through the phone. We analyze the hearing ability of the hearing impaired, design the new model of the hearing aid telephone and test the telephone in three fields-electrical, word perception, user test. Our new tolephone has lour band pass filter channels and the center frequencies of these filters are 500, 1000, 2000, 3000Hz which are considered psychoacoustic factors and telephone line characteristics. The hearing impaired can adjust the total gain characteristics of receiving sound to his hearing ability by setting four volumes in the telelphone. This procedure is called fitting which is a very important factor for the hearing impaired to take meaning of speech. The total gain of this telephone is over 20dB from 250Hz to 3200Hz range. From the results of the tests we certify that our new model is better for the hearing impaired to understand the meaning or telephone speech than the old general models. The next step of developing the hearing aid telephone is to study about compressing sidetone and noise, dividing frequency bands, selecting hearing aid pattern and compensating psychoacoustic loudness. we expect that the advanced hearing aid telephone can be developed by the research about speech perception characteristics of the hearing impaired in engineering and clinical side.

• Journal of Audiology & Otology
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.197-203
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• 2019

Background and Objectives: Many studies have reported no benefit of sound localization, but improved speech understanding in noise after treating patients with single-sided deafness (SSD). Furthermore, their performances provided a large individual difference. The present study aimed to measure the ability of speech perception and gap detection in noise for the SSD patients to better understand their hearing nature. Subjects and Methods: Nine SSD patients with different onset and period of hearing deprivation and 20 young adults with normal hearing and simulated conductive hearing loss as the control groups conducted speech perception in noise (SPIN) and Gap-In-Noise (GIN) tests. The SPIN test asked how many presented sentences were understood at the +5 and -5 dB signal-to-noise ratio. The GIN test was asked to find the shortest gap in white noise with different lengths in the gap. Results: Compared to the groups with normal hearing and simulated instant hearing loss, the SSD group showed much poor performance in both SPIN and GIN tests while supporting central auditory plasticity of the SSD patients. Rather than a longer period of deafness, the large individual variance indicated that the congenital SSD patients showed better performance than the acquired SSD patients in two measurements. Conclusions: The results suggested that comprehensive assessments should be implemented before any treatment of the SSD patient considering their onset time and etiology, although these findings need to be generalized with a large sample size.

• Korean Journal of Audiology
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.197-203
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• 2019

Background and Objectives: Many studies have reported no benefit of sound localization, but improved speech understanding in noise after treating patients with single-sided deafness (SSD). Furthermore, their performances provided a large individual difference. The present study aimed to measure the ability of speech perception and gap detection in noise for the SSD patients to better understand their hearing nature. Subjects and Methods: Nine SSD patients with different onset and period of hearing deprivation and 20 young adults with normal hearing and simulated conductive hearing loss as the control groups conducted speech perception in noise (SPIN) and Gap-In-Noise (GIN) tests. The SPIN test asked how many presented sentences were understood at the +5 and -5 dB signal-to-noise ratio. The GIN test was asked to find the shortest gap in white noise with different lengths in the gap. Results: Compared to the groups with normal hearing and simulated instant hearing loss, the SSD group showed much poor performance in both SPIN and GIN tests while supporting central auditory plasticity of the SSD patients. Rather than a longer period of deafness, the large individual variance indicated that the congenital SSD patients showed better performance than the acquired SSD patients in two measurements. Conclusions: The results suggested that comprehensive assessments should be implemented before any treatment of the SSD patient considering their onset time and etiology, although these findings need to be generalized with a large sample size.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.57-63
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• 2020

The binaural beat is a subjective beating phenomenon due to the frequency difference of sounds heard in both ears, sensed by the human brain. The beating magnitude physically depends on the amplitudes of the two signals with slight different frequencies. Therefore, the binaural beat strength is expected to be affected by the difference in left and right hearing ability. In this study, 34 healthy subjects without hearing loss were chosen. They hear a pure tone sound (450 Hz) at 10 different Sound Pressure Levels (SPLs) (from 50 dB to 27.4 dB) through the one side of ears, while they hear the reference sound (440 Hz, 50 dB) through the other side of ears. Their subjective assessment using a semantic differential method reveals that the binaural beat strength decreases as SPL differences between the two sides of ears increases, if the difference is greater than 2.2 dB. The result suggests that the hearing loss difference between the two sides of ears should be less than 2.2 dB to maximize binaural beating effects.