RESEARCH NEWS
Hear today – Australian Hearing Hub
With one in four Australians expected to experience some form of hearing loss by 2050, the recently opened Australian Hearing Hub at Macquarie University is set to improve the lives of millions of people at all stages of life.
It brings together some of the country’s best researchers, educators and service providers to help people who experience hearing and language disorders, and is a one-stop shop for speech and hearing diagnosis, treatment and therapy.
Purpose-built, the Hearing Hub features the National Acoustic Laboratories’ anechoic chamber, specially designed ‘echo chambers’, and three MEGs – including one specifically for children. It also includes other state-of-the-art facilities for more than 2000 professionals from leading hearing and allied health organisations, together with staff, students and researchers from Macquarie University.
Partners include Australian Hearing, Cochlear Ltd, the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children, the Sydney Cochlear Implant Centre, and The Shepherd Centre and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD).
Together they will provide a full spectrum of services that not only support clients with hearing and speech disorders today, but also teams of researchers collaborating on a range of groundbreaking projects whose impact will be felt long into the future.
“We’re working closely with partners to provide a central point for clinical and educational services for people who need support with hearing loss,” says Professor Janet Greeley, Dean of Macquarie University’s Faculty of Human Sciences.
“By building links with other research groups, both within the Hearing Hub and across Australia it will become a hotbed for research and innovation in new technologies and the delivery of services.”
Central to all research and innovation projects is the desire to make a real difference to the lives of hearing impaired people.
Associate Professor Catherine McMahon, head of audiology at Macquarie, explains that her team has developed objective tests to measure the amount of listening effort that a person with a cochlear implant needs to understand simple words in quiet and noisy conditions.
“This aims to give us a better understanding of how the individual copes with conversation in the real world,” she says.
“We’ve also been investigating the neurophysiological changes that occur in the brain in individuals who have tinnitus [as they progress] through a remediation program.”
Other work at the Hearing Hub is enabling advances in understanding auditory processing, assessing auditory system disorders, developing hearing aid and implant technologies, and improving strategies for rehabilitation and learning to hear.
Macquarie students are also being given the unique opportunity to work alongside experts in the industry, providing an unrivalled learning experience.
Not only will that experience drive industry innovation, it is also set to change the lives of people with hearing and language disorders around the world.
The Australian Hearing Hub is an initiative of the Australian Government being conducted as part of the Education Investment Fund.