Impacts of Hearing Loss on Vision Rehab Outcomes
Vision Rehab aims to help patients with vision impairment achieve the highest level of independence and quality of life in their everyday life. Vision Rehab is different from medical treatment — it is highly individualized and oriented towards the goals considered important by an individual. Typical vision rehab strategies include vision enhancement, sensory substitution, and environment modification. Since using hearing to compensate vision is a critical part in each of these strategies, would patients with hearing impairment receive comparable benefit from contemporary hearing impairment?
Standardize Orientation & Mobility Assessment for DSI
Amongst all vision rehabilitation branches, Orientation & Mobility (O&M) training is a special service that aims to improve the safe and independent travel by individuals with vision impairment. However, there is little consensus on how to assess patients to understand their vision and hearing abilities. Much of the work we have conducted under the sensory integration theme have prepared us to help standardizing O&M assessment for individuals with vision impairment. We consider three parts of the O&M assessment: 1) ask about vision, hearing, and mobility functions; 2) assess patient performances in real-life contexts; and 3) systematically record environmental features key to O&M successes.