An Internet-Based Rehabilitation Program for Warriors with Hearing Loss and Auditory Processing Disorders Secondary to Blast and Traumatic Brain Injur

There are often secondary or tertiary effects to blast-related injuries including ear injury and hearing loss, which may also result in cognitive and linguistic deficits. The PALS medical Phase I prototype will be a modular addition to our existing technologies that assist with the rehabilitation of traumatic brain injury and gait training for patients with stroke, cerebral palsy and amputations. It consists of an audio component and multiple visual components, as well as speech recognition, to help the program adapt to the listeners’ abilities. The audio components will include, but will not be limited to listening without interference, listening with background noise (i.e., competing speakers or in a crowd) and listening to accelerated speech. The visual components will include avatars that will help the patient comprehend visual cues, such as lip reading, facial expressions and body language, as well as other components that may be identified during prototype development. Finally, the speech recognition component of this project will allow for the program to adapt to the patients’ listening capabilities, by increasing or decreasing the level of difficulty of the simulation. This tool will be developed while in constant communication with rehabilitation specialists, to ensure that the patients’ needs are met.