Post by Western University

“If you don’t know what’s going on around you, hearing loss can be incredibly isolating.” Born with permanent hearing loss, #WesternU grad and aspiring audiologist Paige Stickney hopes to help others. Susan Scollie, director of the National Centre for Audiology at Western, is tackling the problem of children rapidly outgrowing their hearing aids through the ALLEars project, which uses AI and 3D-printing to develop affordable, digital solutions for predicting ear growth. Western’s Audiodome, a geodesic structure filled with 91 speakers, allows researchers to place listeners in simulated environments and study how they track familiar voices against competing noise. This helps explain how people hear in noisy settings and mitigates sensory challenges in older adults. The cover story of the new Western Alumni Magazine focuses on research that’s reshaping the future of hearing. Read how Western is all in on optimizing health: https://brnw.ch/21x3uKL