INTRODUCTION Spinal protective devices are a recent addition to the protective equipment worn by competitive and recreational alpine skiers and snowboarders. Their rate of use is not documented at the time of publication. The objective of this study was to examine the current attitudes and recommendations of Canadian alpine ski racing coaches towards spinal protective devices. METHODS A conve...

Speech captured from an in-ear microphone (IEM) under an intra-aural device is beneficial in extremely noisy environments as it maintains a relatively high signal to noise ratio. Due to its limited bandwidth, speech enhancement is required in order to obtain a more natural speech. Consequently, quick and practical measurement of speech quality is important. In this paper, we compare the perform...

Objective: To explore rhinitis treatment, with and without autoinflation of the middle ear, as therapy for otitis media with effusion Design: Prospective, randomised, double blind, placebo-controlled trial of long-term treatment with nasal corticosteroids in OME. Otovent auto-inflation device used when needed over 2 years, with either nasal corticosteroid or placebo, using a 2 ⇥ 2 factorial des...

The inner ear in rats is ectodermally derived. It appears as a placode on day 8 of a 22-day gestational period. In the developing inner ear most of the cells undergo terminal mitosis between gestational days 13 and 15. During this critical period of development exposure to toxic substances may result in malformations of the adult inner ear. To test this hypothesis, rat fetuses were exposed to 5...

Two children who wear a cochlear implant (CI) in one ear and a hearing aid (HA) in the other ear completed a test battery designed to measure speech perception in noise and localization abilities. The children had different lengths of device use for both the CI and the HA (S1 having more CI experience than S2). General trends indicate that the use of an HA in the non-CI ear may benefit localiza...

OBJECTIVE To report the long-term results of cochlear implantation in cases with chronic otitis media or atelectasis using a single surgical technique performed in a single cochlear implant center. PATIENTS Nine patients who were implanted using the blind-pit closure of the external ear canal technique (4 patients with adhesive otitis media and 5 with radical mastoid cavities). Follow-up rang...

OBJECTIVE Currently, no large animal model exists for surgical-experimental exploratory analysis of implantable hearing devices. In a histomorphometric study, we sought to investigate whether sheep or pig cochleae are suitable for this purpose and whether device implantation is feasible. METHODS Skulls of pig and sheep cadavers were examined using high-resolution 128-slice computed tomography...

In this study, we developed a novel heart rate (HR) monitoring approach in which we measure the pressure variance of the surface of the ear canal. A scissor-shaped apparatus equipped with a piezoelectric film sensor and a hardware circuit module was designed for high wearability and to obtain stable measurement. In the proposed device, the film sensor converts in-ear pulse waves (EPW) into elec...