USU audiology labs research hearing impairment
USU has four research labs that focus on hearing loss. Each one focuses on different populations and disorders. One lab explores the experience of hearing loss in individuals and children, while another focuses on the barriers parents face while trying to get their children to wear their hearing aids.
According to their website, the mission of the Hearing Health Lab is to understand hearing loss and develop new tests for hearing. The lab researches the possible causes of hearing loss in adults, as well as noise-related hearing loss typically seen in military personnel subject to frequent loud noises.
Aryn Kamerer, an assistant professor in the audiology department, is an employee at the lab.
“My lab tries to study what’s actually going on in the inner ear and in the brain that’s causing that hearing loss,” Kamerer said. “Then developing new diagnostic tests to identify those pathologies.”
According to Kamerer, this research is important because hearing loss can affect 75% of people over the age of 65. Hearing loss also can be very isolating, cutting people off from previous activities they might have enjoyed.
Kamerer receives help with her research from the grad students in her lab, including Makenzie Meadows, a second-year student in the doctorate of audiology program.
“I like getting people’s experiences and listening to their stories,” Meadows said. “I’ve had a lot of bad medical experiences where providers just wouldn’t take me seriously or listen to my concerns.”
It isn’t always easy to find people willing to participate in a study, but this hasn’t stopped the lab.
“Most of my research involves human subjects,” Kamerer said. “The process really begins with coming up with the study and getting IRB approval for the study.”
Many of the volunteers used in research are found on campus through flyers or through the psychology department, which provides course credit to psychology majors participating in research studies.
“They actually need to physically come in,” Kamerer said. “A lot of the studies that I do, we’re measuring brain waves, and so we have to put electrodes on the head and in the ears to study it.”
At first, the research process started with simple interviews with people wanting to participate.
“I think there were 15 different participants that we saw,” Meadows said. “We just interviewed them and asked them about their experience and just shared their story with us.”
One of the main goals Kamerer hopes to accomplish through research of the inner ear and the cause of hearing loss is providing resources for others to use in their own research, and test people who could be suffering more efficiently.
“What we would like to do is develop this free automated tool that’s open source,” Kamerer said. “People can tailor it to work with whatever they want for all researchers and all clinicians that do this type of hearing test with these electrodes and brainwaves.”
The research hasn’t all been smooth sailing; Kamerer and her team of graduate students have had some complications in the past trying to gather information to contact people willing to share their experience from an online form.
“We don’t know if it was a bot, or if it was real people, but somebody was just spamming it,” Kamerer said. “My poor research assistant had to sift through like 500 fake responses that participated in this study to actually find people who seemed like real people to contact and interview.”
Meadows was the one who had to sort through all the possible bot entries. Out of the 500 entries, only two were possible participants.
“Finding the motivation to just keep going and continue on was kind of a struggle sometimes,” Meadows said.
Though there are setbacks and hard moments when conducting research, Kamerer and her team find reasons to continue their work to help improve people’s lives.
“What I love about my job in general as a research scientist is that I get to do something new every day, and I get paid to learn stuff that I’m interested in,” Kamerer said.
For Meadows, it has helped her better understand what is expected after graduation.
“It’s really helped me grow, not only as a student, but also as a future clinician,” Meadows said. “Being able to do research and see how hard it is and see how challenging it is and how much time it takes really puts it more into perspective.”