# DEVELOPING EVIDENCE-BASED CLINICAL TOOLS FOR MANAGING MILD HEARING LOSS IN CHILDREN

> **NIH NIH R01** · FATHER FLANAGAN'S BOYS' HOME · 2020 · $610,342

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
 Even with recent improvements in the early identification of hearing loss, children with mild bilateral
hearing loss (MBHL) continue to experience significant delays in communication, social, and academic
outcomes due to uncertainty about the benefits of hearing aids for this population. The lack of clinical protocols
and tools that are sensitive to the listening needs of children with MBHL contribute to this uncertainty. Children
with MBHL often perform like children with normal hearing on current clinical outcome measures. The goal of
this proposal is to develop novel clinical protocols and tools that are sensitive to the challenges faced by
children with MBHL. Current hearing-aid candidacy criteria based on the audiogram do not adequately quantify
the effects of the child’s ear-canal acoustics and self-generated noise on their thresholds. Aim 1 of the
proposal will be to develop audibility-based hearing-aid candidacy tools for children with MBHL that account for
ear-canal acoustics and self-generated noise. Novel audiological assessment methods will allow for
quantification of these factors and for the development of hearing-aid candidacy criteria based speech
audibility that are not possible with current methods. Aim 2 of the proposal will be to validate clinical measures
of speech recognition with speech maskers, reverberation, and overhearing that reflect real-world difficulties of
children with MBHL. The reduction in audibility for low-intensity sounds is the main consequence of MBHL,
which leads to difficulty segregating a target talker from a background talker, understanding speech in noise
with reverberation, and problems with overhearing distant talkers. Clinical speech recognition tasks that reflect
these specific listening challenges will be developed and validated. Aim 3 of the proposal will be to perform a
clinical validation of a new test battery for hearing assessment, hearing-aid candidacy, and outcomes for
children with MBHL. In collaboration with leading pediatric audiology centers around the U.S., the novel
assessment and speech recognition measures will be used to validate these measures with a large clinical
population of children with MBHL. The knowledge generated from this research will fundamentally improve the
diagnosis and management of MBHL during childhood.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10044253
- **Project number:** 1R01DC018330-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** FATHER FLANAGAN'S BOYS' HOME
- **Principal Investigator:** Ryan W. McCreery
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $610,342
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2020-07-20 → 2025-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10044253

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10044253, DEVELOPING EVIDENCE-BASED CLINICAL TOOLS FOR MANAGING MILD HEARING LOSS IN CHILDREN (1R01DC018330-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10044253. Licensed CC0.

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