1,720,963 research outputs found
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on social isolation in older adults with vision loss or hearing loss
No full textThe dataset consists of two parts: (1) the data from the intake survey and (2) the data from the main survey. For each part, there are three files including (1) the text version of the survey (.pdf), (2) the survey data (.csv), and (3) the codebook of the data (.csv). The pdf files list all questions in the intake and the main survey. The csv data files include the de-identified responses from each participant. The csv codebook files include the codes used in the csv data files.
Image attribution: Haydn Golden via Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/WUbFp7l75Bs)This is a dataset from a project investigating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on older adults with sensory loss. Three groups of older adults -- vision loss (VL, N = 13), hearing loss (HL, N = 24), and controls (CTL, N = 18) -- were recruited from the Twin Cities Minnesota community (mean age = 68.18, min = 57, max = 80). Participants were interviewed every 5 to 7 weeks from the end of April to the end of October using the same set of questions. The initial interview at the end of April included retrospective responses to questions regarding participants’ status at the beginning of March, prior to pandemic restrictions, and the beginning of April, after the onset of pandemic restrictions. The survey questions addressed (1) demographic and health information, (2) average number of in-person and electronic social contacts per week, (3) sense of loneliness, (4) accessibility of daily services such as grocery shopping, (5) mental health, (6) worry levels about COVID infection, and (7) impact on daily activities. The dataset is released for sharing and replication purposes.The project is supported by the Center for Applied and Translational Sensory Science at the University of Minnesota.Wu, Yueh-Hsun; Nelson, Peggy; Oeding, Kristi; Teece, Katherine; Anderson, Elizabeth; Legge, Gordon E. (2021). The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on social isolation in older adults with vision loss or hearing loss. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://doi.org/10.13020/vmd2-pa76
Improving hearing aid outcomes in background noise: An investigation of outcome measures and patient factors
No full textUniversity of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. November 2022. Major: Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences. Advisors: Evelyn Davies-Venn, Peggy Nelson. 1 computer file (PDF); xiv 167 pages.Background noise is reported to be one of the most difficult listening environments by hearing aid users. Digital noise reduction and directional microphones have been added to hearing aids and remote microphones and frequency modulation systems as accessories to help augment speech understanding in background noise for hearing aid users. Despite having this technology, patients still have concerns in background noise. This indicates that there is still a need for evidence-based tools for assessing patient speech understanding needs as well as quantifying amplification benefits in noise to help improve these situations. This dissertation seeks to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of current evidence-based practices tools available for improving speech understanding in noise for individuals with hearing loss. Three main research findings are reported in this dissertation. The first study examined the viability of using functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a tool that can be used to measure the hemodynamic response to neural activity in the brain. This study sought to examine if fNIRS is a viable clinical tool for assessing the impact of different listening conditions, speech materials, and hearing aid settings on listening effort. Behavioral data supported the impact of signal degradation on intelligibility and that syntactically complex speech results in greater difficulty parsing content. fNIRS data supported that this difficulty in parsing content could be considered listening effort due to contrasts in hemodynamic responses in the lateral inferior frontal gyrus between grammatically simple and complex constructions. Future work should consider evaluating fNIRS in an older hearing loss group with contrasting degrees of hearing loss and speech complexity. The second study examined the viability of using spectral-ripple modulation detection thresholds (SMD), a tool that could help assess a person's broadband spectral processing abilities as an alternative for a person's speech understanding in noisy environments. In this study, SMD thresholds were examined in a group with normal hearing and a group with hearing loss to determine the impact of bandwidth and intensity on SMD thresholds. Results revealed a significant difference in bandwidth and level within the hearing loss and normal hearing groups, but not across groups. Future work should examine this effect using audibility-controlled conditions across the listener groups, such as simulating a hearing aid in these situations to determine the impact of amplification on SMD thresholds. The final study examined various listener factors that could influence a person's noise tolerance. The acceptable noise level test was used as a metric for noise tolerance. The listener factors that were examined included personality traits, digits in noise ability, and working memory along with hearing aid factors to determine if they can predict a person’s acceptable noise level. Results revealed that the Device Oriented Subjective Outcome subscale of listening effort and the digits in noise task were able to predict the acceptable noise level of a hearing aid user. Future work should look at other patient factors to predict noise tolerance. These three research studies aimed to determine what tests can provide a better assessment of listening needs in noise for persons with hearing loss. The second goal was to determine if individual factors were able to predict a person’s ability to tolerate background noise. The end goal of these studies is to use this information along with future research to determine which individuals would benefit from specific hearing aid settings and/or auditory training based on outcome measures and individual factors.Oeding, Kristi. (2022). Improving hearing aid outcomes in background noise: An investigation of outcome measures and patient factors. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/252322
Teaching Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students in Post-Secondary Education [Facilitated Discussion]
Get PDFFollow-up discussion from a presentation on the same topic by Kari Sween, about the learning needs of deaf and hard of hearing students in college
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
The effectiveness of directional microphone alignment in the Baha Divino
Get PDFThe primary objective of this research study is to determine if off-vertical directional microphone alignments of the Baha Divino significantly impact the Reception Threshold for Sentences (RTS, in dB) using the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT) in a diffuse listening situation
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