Pediatric Audiology

The Akron Children's Hospital audiology team diagnose and treat hearing loss in children. Our goals are to identify hearing loss as early in life as possible, provide access to hearing aids, and coordinate follow-up services for intervention, monitoring and ongoing evaluation.

We have one focus: kids.

The Audiology Department requires a referral from your primary care physician or specialist prior to scheduling an appointment.

Our pediatric audiologists are experienced in an array of diagnostics for infants, children, teens, and individuals with neurological and/or developmental complications who are considered difficult to test.

Depending on the age and developmental level of your child, we offer several options:

• Behavioral audiometry, both in sound field and using insert or traditional earphones. This option includes visual reinforcement audiometry and play audiometry.
• Basic hearing evaluation, including air/bone conduction, speech reception threshold and speech discrimination testing
• Tympanometry, which determines the functioning of the middle ear
• Otoacoustic emission testing, which assesses cochlear outer hair cell function in the inner ear.
• Auditory Processing Evaluations, which assesses the brain’s ability to process sound.
• Diagnostic Auditory Brainstem Evoked Response (BSER) testing, requires no participation for  the child, determines how well information travels from the hearing nerve to the brain, (unsedated for children under 5 months of age), (sedated for children 5 months of age and older).
• Auditory Steady State Response (ASSR) audiometry,  
• Universal Newborn Hearing Screenings (UNHS) in all our hospital’s Special Care Nurseries and Main Campus NICU.
• Follow up Newborn Hearing Evaluations, offered for babies who referred on their Universal Newborn Hearing Screening in the Special Care Nurseries or the birth hospital.

The pediatric audiologists are fully integrated into the hospital providing inpatient and outpatient evaluations and special services for the Down syndrome program, cystic fibrosis center, autism diagnostic clinic, infant therapy program and cancer survivorship program.

Hearing aid services.

We provide a complete range of hearing aid types (e.g., digital and bone anchored, etc.). If your child is under 18 years of age or has an underlying medical condition, clearance from an ENT physician is required before the hearing aid evaluation and fitting.

These fittings and evaluations include:

• Hearing aid and earmold selection

• Counseling regarding care and maintenance

• Electroacoustic analysis

• Real ear measurements and DSL programming for enhanced hearing aid fitting, verification, and validation

• Assistive listening devices, including FM units, telephone amplifiers, alerting devices and Bluetooth accessories

• Custom earmolds, swim molds, noise reduction earmolds, and musician’s earmolds

• Follow-up appointments to ensure optimal fit

• Collaboration with local schools and county ESC’s to ensure academic needs are being met with regards to hearing needs

• EARS (Early Auditory Response Strategies) program which is a collaborative effort between the Audiology department and the Speech Pathology department.  For children diagnosed with hearing loss, we work their families and physicians to get them on track with the services they need such as amplification (hearing aids) and listening habilitation, speech and language evaluation and therapy, Early Intervention services, infant therapy evaluations, and assistance with coordinating school services, genetics evaluations, and special imaging