Birds whistle children through hearing tests

Step into a university’s children’s hearing clinic and enter a world of escaping Pokémon, whistling birds and plastic cup towers waiting to be built.

From now until October 14 the University of Auckland clinic in Glen Innes will conduct free hearing tests for children aged three to six on Wednesday and Friday.

The sessions help University of Auckland’s Master of Audiology students develop their skills in testing children’s hearing.

Before testing actual patients, the students practise on each other. But having to interact in a real-life scenario is a vital skill, team leader and audiologist Caroline Selvaratnam said.

“You are working with a wide range of people. Some don’t have English as their first language, they may be in the low socio-economic area and they may have learning or literacy issues,” she said.

“What you tend to find in a university is that you are testing people who are in an academic environment. And that is actually not normal.”

Especially with children, where it is impossible to predict how a child is going to behave.

“A lot of our students are quite young. Not many have had a chance to interact with children, so they don’t necessarily come into the programme with a good grasp as to what normal child behaviour is and how to play and how to get a child to do the things they need to do,” Mrs Selvaratnam said.

The ear. Photo: Anna Hjortdal

Student Nardip Gill Singh said it can be quite hard to get children to complete tasks for a hearing test.

“Their attention is such a big part of the test. If they can attend to what we are trying to test for them, then we can get all our results.”

And this is where dinosaurs, birds and plastic cup towers enter the picture.

“We do something called play-audiometry. We make a game, hopefully the children like the game, and then they will play. While they do that, we can test their hearing,” Mr Singh said.

When Te Waha Nui visisted last week, he played a game involving whistling birds. He told the child there were birds in the room and they liked to whistle.

An audiometer was used to produce whistle sounds. When the child heard a whistle a plastic cup had to be stacked on top of another. The aim of the game was to build a tower for the birds to stay.

A wide variety of children come in. The students see everything from children with normal hearing and glue ear to permanent hearing loss. Some of the children need medical treatment, others are fitted with a hearing aid.

An audiometer and a bird tower in the making. Photo: Anna Hjortdal

When children start school, a hearing screening test is performed. In a national 2006 report, the national audiometric failure rate was estimated at 6.6 per cent.

It is estimated that five per cent of children in New Zealand have auditory processing disorder (APD), where the ears process sound normally but the incoming information isn’t processed correctly in the brain.

One of these children is audiologist Alice Smith’s 12-year-old son, Jackson. He was first diagnosed with dyslexia, but when he had his hearing tested they found out he had APD. Jackson then got hearing aid in school.

“What we saw was that he was below [the] national average in almost all of his subjects. Within the first six months of having the hearing aids, he jumped up to [the] national average and has continued to stay above [the] national average for pretty much everything,” she said.