February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Currently, the test for hearing involves shaking a rattle behind the ear of the child when it is 7 months old.
But doctors say that some children can sense someone standing behind them, resulting in some hearing defects going unnoticed until a year and a half.
The new machine will send a sound into the ear canal: if the ear is working properly, the reflected sound will be measured by the machine.
Development manager for the National Deaf Children’s Society Pauline Walker said that “many babies, if they have a hearing loss, have worked out strategies by the age of 8 months, so that they are perhaps more reactive to movement than other children.”
“It has been operating for some time in England. There’s going to be a roll out in Wales and there’s developments now in Scotland, so we are catching up with the rest of the UK,” she said.