The Ida Institute have been working with pediatric hearing care professionals to develop a new IDA tool that will help pediatric audiologists understand the impact of hearing loss from a child´s point of view.
The tool will be called “My World” and it will allow pediatric audiologists to explore e.g. home and classroom situations with hearing impaired children through building ‘mock’ environments on ground-floor maps. The child can personalize “their” common life situations, such as sitting in a classroom or playing with other kids at the playground by choosing from a number of e.g. figures and furniture and adding them to their own map. The audiologist can then use the map created by the child to open a dialogue about how they communicate and cope in different situations. This can help the audiologist answer a number of questions: How does the child manage technology? How does the child deal with their hearing loss in different social situations? “When is it easy and when is it difficult?”
‘This has been a very fruitful collaborative effort and the feedback from the try-outs in clinics has been very positive’ said Managing Director, Lise Lotte Bundesen.
The tool has been tested in clinics and the final development is now underway. The expected release date is the end of September.