Largo Luchino Visconti, 4
22012 Cernobbio, Lake Como, Italy
This two-yearly audiology meeting grew to great popularity in the 2010s. It provided a large enough forum for the best in European audiology and allied disciplines in a way that national meetings had not been able to. It also drew a wider international audience, with good organisation and an attractive venue offering linked vacationing possibilities.
Because of COVID-19, HeAL 2020 had to be cancelled. The questioning of large international meetings had already begun, for cost and time reasons, pressures on research budgets, carbon footprint, and uncertain added value in the internet age. The strategic and commercial question becomes which meetings should, and will, survive and why; and in what live/online mix?
In the event there was quite a high percentage of late cancellations at HeAL 2022 as case-rates failed to drop; from Australia, Melanie Ferguson of Curtin University, Perth, gave two remote presentations. Readiness to adapt in this way now seems essential.
Mark Haggard showing a Europe-wide sampling of data for the Eurotitis study in a talk about which children with otitis media really do need audiometry.
HeAL 2022 fielded a session on listening effort (LE), with Manchester-based Callum Shields expertly reviewing ways to quantify it, and telemedicine/e-health. Their intersections now include cognition/dementia and hearing, m-health (specifically mobile-phone-based), ‘sub-clinical’ hearing loss (eg extended high frequencies and slight HL), and supra-threshold problems (eg SiN, temporal processing).
The consensus towards the end of the meeting was that it had indeed adapted well, with suitable choice of spoken versus poster, time for questioning and for conversations in corridors and over refreshments. The standard of presentation and time-keeping was generally high.
The need to establish precedence makes the announcement of startling new fundamental results rare at such meetings, but David Moore and colleagues from Cincinnati, Ohio, using fMRI, revealed reduced resting brain activity in children with ‘listening difficulties’ (LiD), now the accepted catch-all term for hearing problems at any age, despite normal audiometry. Children reported by their caregivers to have LiD, also had impaired speech segregation and cognitive function. Overall, the data suggest a neurological dysfunction in the ability to focus on, deconstruct and resynthesise speech, by comparison with typically listening peers.
Doris Bamiou, from London, gave an authoritative overall review on innovative approaches to auditory processing disorders, setting the tone for a four-country symposium emphasising the neurological aspects of this controversial problem. Spot the overlap, despite differing terms. In autistic spectrum disorder (ASD), poor hearing is usually attributed to increased sensitivity to sounds. However, a broader range of hearing and cognitive processing problems was identified, possibly reflecting a disruption of excitation/inhibition balance, as postulated in other ASD control systems.
As usual, Belgium and the Netherlands contributed an innovative series of papers. Cas Smits, from Amsterdam, led a symposium featuring speakers from the two countries on innovative uses of speech-in-noise testing using digits-in-noise.
Institutional evolution was in the air: the WHO hearing envoy, Shelly Chadha introduced hearWHO, a smartphone screening test that has already been taken by more than a million people, and which promises to revolutionise remote testing in low- and middle-income countries. Mark Laureyns, from Belgium, moderated the ‘Make Listening Safe’ session, followed by several international participants expressing interest to join the World Hearing Forum. And the European Federation of Hard-of-Hearing People held a session with a web connection for the professional speech-to-text interpreter.
Prof Mark Haggard, MA PhD FMedSci HFRCSEdin, Dept of Psychology, University of Cambridge.
