Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Hearing Enhancement Moves to Gallaudet               

 

by Matt Bakke, Ph.D. Director of the RERC on Hearing Enhancement

 

Gallaudet University has become the new home of the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Hearing Enhancement. The previous the home of the RERC, since its inception in 1983, was the Lexington Center for the Deaf in Jackson Heights, New York.  Funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR), a branch of the United States Department of Education, the RERC on Hearing Enhancement is the only one of 17 RERC’s exclusively focused on people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing.

 

In August, the Director of the RERC, Matthew Bakke, accepted a faculty position at Gallaudet in the Department of Audiology and Speech Language Pathology. The Lexington Center for the Deaf graciously consented to allow the RERC to follow Dr. Bakke to Gallaudet. Lexington continues to be a major collaborator on the RERC, along with the League for the Hard of Hearing in New York; Self Help for Hard of Hearing People in Maryland; the California School for Professional Psychology in California, and Assistive Technologies for Deafness, in California.

 

The RERC on Hearing Enhancement is charged with improving access for Deaf and Hard of Hearing individuals through research and technology.  To this end, the RERC develops and evaluates technological aids for the various communities of people with hearing loss, according to their needs. Among the many areas currently being studied by the RERC are the multi-microphone directional hearing aids; fitting procedures for digital hearing aids; handheld directional microphones when used with assistive devices; the measurement and treatment of tinnitus; the use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology as a communication aid for people who are Deaf; training in the use of assistive technology; investigations into the interference caused by digital wireless telephones; and dissemination of RERC research results to people with hearing loss.

 

More information about the RERC may be found at its website, www.hearingresearch.org. Information about NIDRR may be found at www.ed.gov/offices/OSERS/NIDRR.