Verbetering van de auditieve rehabilitatie van kinderen.

Communication through language is vital to develop and maintain everything around us. By 15 years of age, about 5 out of 1000 children suffer from a moderate, severe or profound hearing impairment that can potentially affect communication, learning, psychosocial development and academic achievement if not appropriately handled.

The EU promotes the active inclusion and full participation of disabled people in society. However, full active inclusion in an oral society can only be achieved through cooperation and involvement across disciplines (language, psychology, audiology, engineering, special education,…). It is therefore of fundamental importance to approach the inclusion of children with hearing impairment in an interdisciplinary manner, and to train future experts to adopt such principles in their research and practice.

The objectives of improving Children’s Auditory REhabilitation (iCARE) are twofold:

1. to provide training create a new generation of researchers capable of exploiting the synergies between different disciplines to optimize spoken communication in children with hearing impairment
2. to combine research across disciplines to develop novel methods, training skills and procedures for improving auditory rehabilitation

iCARE is an international and interdisciplinary consortium from academia, industry and socio-economic agencies. The proposed training consortium is unique because the partners are specialized in a variety of disciplines, both technical and non-technical, all of utmost importance to the core issue: optimizing inclusion of children with hearing impairment in an oral society through evidence-based research. The consortium will provide comprehensive training of fellows to become ‘communication experts’, and enable the development of novel methods, tools and evaluation material that will suit the evolving needs of children with hearing impairment in a holistic manner.