Awareness for Pediatric Hearing Loss through Engineering

Research: The structure and design of EIH was centered around research of the project’s clinical need and was essential to our concept design process. Our interdisciplinary team of engineering students performed extensive literature reviews, held stakeholder interviews, and shadowed audiologists to gain a comprehensive understanding of hearing loss and the resources already available for families and the community. While it is evident that children with hearing loss experience the world differently from those with normal hearing and often face challenges including social stigma, miscommunications, etc. as many do not fully understand the extent of their hearing loss, we found it surprising that caregivers are occasionally in denial or are not compliant with treatment plans provided for the child. This is a clinical pressing issue that our team wanted to address. Thus, extensive research on existing solutions and their lacking aspects became the foundation of our project.

Other perspectives: Our project considered various key stakeholders that included the patients, the caregivers, and the clinicians. The pressing clinical need that our team tried to tackle affects each stakeholder differently. Through research and holding stakeholder interviews, we were able to look at the unmet need from different perspectives. For instance, for children with hearing loss, they expressed many challenges of social stigma, miscommunication, additional eye strain, listening fatigue, etc. For caregivers, they expressed their frustration that they must educate and remind teachers about their child’s hearing loss and sometimes not being able to fully comprehend what their child is going through. Similarly, for clinicians, they must constantly remind and emphasize the importance of treatment compliance. With just three different key stakeholders, their experiences are vastly different. It was important to consider all their pains into our solution that it can be effective for all populations.

Idea Generation: The most crucial assignment and portion of our project was the identification of the core functions and the following brainstorm ideation session. After holding our stakeholder interviews, we identified patterns in children’s frustration about their hearing loss. We used these learned frustrations and geared them to essential components of our solution. Thus, our five core functions were that the solution must be customizable that simulates the different types and levels of hearing loss, able to simulate multiple environments, be accessible to any user, have easy training and set-up, and be durable. With these core functions, we were able to have a brainstorming session. Our team additionally recruited two more students, a computer science and a biology student, for this ideation session to gain different perspectives outside of engineering. It was also important to encourage wild ideas and build on the ideas of others which led to our novel proposed solution.

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Writing: Throughout the quarter, the assignments were designed to help meet project milestones, providing the basic structure and information for the final presentations and reports. I specifically took on the composition of our project’s needs statement. While the basic structure of the needs statement was provided, it took much articulation to craft a single, informative statement. I initially started with four drafts catered to how the lack of pediatric hearing loss awareness affects various stakeholders. As our team scoped down to what stakeholder we wanted to address, I continued to further iterate the needs statement after interviewing Dr. Ou. It was surprising to learn that some parents were in denial and did not even believe in their child’s hearing loss, resulting in noncompliance of treatment plans. The final statement was “A way to address the lack of pediatric hearing loss treatment compliance in caregivers so that they can better understand their child’s experiences and increase their awareness for hearing loss”.

Providing and Receiving Feedback: Our team consistently met twice a week to work on our assignments. This facilitated high collaboration and ensured that action items were completed in a promptly manner. After the initial formation of our team, we created a team agreement that included aspects that we agreed would create a successful partnership. This included being prepared at meetings which meant that everyone’s portion should be at least drafted prior to the meeting. Each member of the team followed this criterion which allowed us to provide and receive feedback on our individual portions so that the final assignment submitted is our best work and cohesive. It was important to provide honest, constructive, and supportive feedback as this project is a group effort. In addition to our mutual feedback, the teaching team provided abundant feedback on our assignments. The feedback received allowed us to think creatively, especially for our solution’s design. For instance, our preliminary design was a simple simulation device, and after repeatedly receiving feedback, we were able to add a virtual reality component that made our solution novel.

Listening: Our team was able to interview six families to gain a better understanding of hearing loss. Each child with hearing loss had different types of hearing loss and unique experiences. For instance, a 14-year-old girl, who has one cochlear implant and hearing aid, attends a school with a deaf and hard of hearing program but expressed immense frustration over the teacher’s usage of the FM transmitter as oftentimes her teachers forget to turn it on. On the other hand, a 12-year-old boy, who developed microtia before birth, had an unfortunate experience where his teacher played distracting background music and instead of turning the music down or off, the teacher made him sit outside in the hallway, making him feel punished and embarrassed. Through these interviews, I could sense and empathize with the irritating experiences, and as we were conducting these interviews virtually, I witnessed the extra effort that these children with hearing loss put into our conversation, whether it be trying to read our lips, asking for clarification, or increasing the volume. I could tell it was important for them to advocate for themselves and for having a group willing to listen to their everyday challenges.