All Professionals
The Rehabilitation Process
When a person is beginning to think about cochlear implantation for them or their child, it is natural to focus on the assessment and surgery phases of the process. However it is important to remember that following these there is an ongoing process of rehabilitation (or "habilitation" for those who have had no access to sound before)
This takes the form of two main streams: Programming the device - so the user can hear sounds through it, and a Rehabilitation process - teaching the user to "make sense of" the sounds they're hearing.
Rehabilitation
In many cases, the user will have been without sound stimulation for some time, or ever in the case of someone hearing impaired from birth. Even for someone only recently hearing impaired it is likely that sound through the implant will, at least at first, be very different to what they remember. It takes some time for the brain to become acclimatised to the new stimulation.
To aid this process, and make sounds meaningful to the user is the goal of the rehabilitation programme.
Who carries out rehabilitation?
This is usually a team consisting of specialist speech and language therapists and specialist teachers of the deaf. Other professionals with appropriate skills will commonly be involved.
Where is it carried out?
Some of the appointments will be carried out at the implant centre. However most CI centres employ an outreach programme involving home and/or school visits as necessary.
In addition, the specialist speech therapists and teachers of the deaf will arrange to visit and advise the local supporting professionals.
What is it?
The rehabilitation programme is a structured set of exercises designed to facilitate the CI user making sense of the sound signal. It might begin with exercises exploring how the user can simply detect sounds. Some users report that when they first begin to use the implant, many things sound the same. One of the goals of the process is to help the user differentiate between sounds, and then words in speech.
The persons own speech and language stage is also looked at. The speech therapist can design a programme to help advance the speech development, appropriate to each individual. This is of particular importance to children who have been without any access to sound before.
The overall rehabilitation programme is tailored to the needs of the individual adult or child. As with programming it is usual that more visits/appointments will be required in the earlier stages of the process.