Deaf Teenager Contributes to the Development of VR Treatment for Hearing-Impaired Kids

Everyone loves a heart-warming tech story and it doesn’t get much better than a youth with a disability helping others by using technology in a positive way. All of those boxes are ticked by the story of Kaitlyn – a profoundly deaf teenager from London – who has harnessed the power of VR to help others like her.

Kaitlyn was fitted with cochlear implants at the age of three, but explains that they are not the perfect solution for the deaf. A cochlear implant is a compact electronic device that enables individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing to understand verbal communications and perceive sounds around them. It is a surgical procedure that entails the implantation of a device beneath the epidermis behind the ear, and its invasive nature puts many potential users off.

While these are seen as being an enormous benefit to deaf people, they can still miss important details. Many users find that they have to double up on what they are hearing by using lip reading and that makes it a laborious task. By far the most preferred method of sending and receiving information is the use of British Sign Language (BSL), which is rarely misinterpreted, but it is a very hard skill to learn.

Training Made Easier

Kaitlyn, a 20-year-old actor and theatre student from London, explains: “Cochlear implants are amazing but I don’t hear what a hearing person hears. I have to work incredibly hard to lip read or find a visual way of communicating, such as British Sign Language.”

Internationally renowned BSL is a visual means of communicating using gestures, facial expression, and body language. Sign Language is used mainly by people who are Deaf or have hearing impairments, but the fingerspelling alphabet is used in sign language to spell out names of people and places for which there is not a standard sign. All in all, learning signing is a difficult task, and anything that can make it easy is welcomed. But it has been found that with sufficient focused training, cochlear implant users can become accustomed to being in stressful situations and use their devices to the full without having to fully learn BSL.

And that is where Kaitlyn comes in.

Kaitlyn has been working on testing and designing a VR gaming experiment that is designed to aid children and young people with comparable hearing impairments. The goal of the trial is to educate listeners to better detect sounds by using both ears (known as “BEARS”) simultaneously. Children and young people with cochlear implants have a hard time with this. The BEARS suite of games offers a range of immersive experiences that incorporate 3-D sound and vision, and includes activities such as sports, music games and serving customers in a busy pizza restaurant. Deaf people find these kinds of situations difficult to cope with, and VR training of this nature helps put them at ease.

Using VR to Help

Numerous studies demonstrate that training may enhance speech comprehension in noisy and musical environments, as well as sound localisation. Children and teenagers can play a series of virtual reality games created by the BEARS team at their own home. The team’s goal is to determine if three months of at-home listening instruction with an iPad or a virtual reality headset will enhance hearing and quality of life by helping users pick important conversation out of the sea of background sounds.

Kaitlyn’s involvement in the project started at the age of 18 when she came across a pamphlet regarding the project while attending an appointment at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. She enthusiastically volunteered, and was drawn to the potential of VR as a tool in this important area.

The project is supported and funded by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), and brings together speech and language therapists, surgeons, audio engineers, audiologists, children and young people using cochlear implants to create games under Deborah Vickers from the University of Cambridge and Dan Jiang from Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust.

Kaitlyn is a regular game player, and saw her involvement as being a way to enjoy some VR gaming time as well as helping others. She said “I played the games at home every week for three months and afterwards I noticed my sound location skills had improved – even after this short period of time. I fed back on the games so they could be developed further to make them as user friendly for children and young people as possible.”

Currently, over 160 children and young people aged between 8 and 16 years old are enrolled onto the project trial at sites in Belfast, Birmingham, Bradford, Cambridge, Kilmarnock, London, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Nottingham, Oxford and Southampton, with more sites planned.

Jameel Muzaffar, NIHR National Specialty Lead for Ear, Nose and Throat Surgery & Audiology says: “Cochlear implants, while life-changing, do not restore natural hearing. They act as an electronic ear and send electrical pulses to the hearing nerve via electrodes placed inside the ear. But children and young people still struggle with combining sounds from both ears and listening skills don’t just come to you – you have to sit down and improve them.”

He went on to say: “the BEARS project represents a major step forward in addressing these issues. By offering a tailored, interactive, and patient-centred approach, the BEARS VR-based training games have the potential to transform spatial hearing skills, improve understanding of speech in noisy conditions and enhance quality of life for young cochlear implant users.”

The project is ongoing and if you think that you or someone you know fits the project criteria, you can apply to join the study here.

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