iCARE (improving Children’s Auditory REhabilitation) is an EU supported project involving several partners ranging from researchers to businesses to teachers and parental organisations, and aims to facilitate synergies across disciplines in order to improve the lives of children with hearing disabilities.
The EU promotes the active inclusion and full participation of disabled people in society. Due to the complexity of deafness, full active inclusion in an oral society can only be achieved through cooperation and involvement across disciplines such as; medicine, neurology, language, psychology, audiology, engineering, speech therapy and special education.
Researchers must understand the interdisciplinary nature of the needs of children with hearing impairment better. The ongoing iCARE project is a necessary platform for interaction and competence exchange between experts from various disciplines, academia and companies etc.
Carsten Svensson explains why Ecophon is involved in the project:
“Our role is to educate the researchers about room acoustics and connect them to the built environment. At the beginning of the project, all iCARE partners and researchers were invited to a workshop on room acoustics. That was a good start for people to get to know each other.”
Plenty of activities are organised under the umbrella of iCARE, stay updated and read more about the project on their website.
Fast facts:
- The goals, in brief, of iCARE are to:
– Provide training to create a new generation of researchers.
– Combine research across disciplines.
- At birth about 1 out of 1000 children has a bilateral profound hearing impairment.
– This figure rises with increasing age.
– Hearing impairment can affect communciation, learning, psychosocial development and academic achievement.
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