Audiology is a profession that involves studying about sound, ear and hearing. An Audiologist works with individuals and families of individuals with hearing loss. My current research and the research that I wish to do in the future, involves older adults with hearing loss. My goal is to improve hearing aid outcomes for older adults with hearing loss, and to improve access to affordable hearing care.
Through my research, I seek to add evidence-based results to the Audiology research repository. I hope that my research findings can be used by Clinicians and patients to make better decisions about their choice of hearing aids and gain more satisfaction from their devices. Thus, since my research area is very patient-centered, I want my research to be easily accessible and comprehensible to individuals with hearing loss. This was the impetus for my digital project.
The aim of my project, thus, is to create a web interface to make my findings easily available to general public in a language that is easier to understand than journal articles. Designing a web page was relatively new to me. During the first few weeks, I discussed the purpose of my project with my studio point of contact, Ethan DeGross. He helped me come up with a more realistic plan of action. Thus, I decided to make a web page with a link to all my current and past research projects. I aim to continue adding to this web page as more results of the different projects become available, and also as I continue with my research journey in the future.
Other questions that I had were about the consent required to display results from different studies. I received help to resolve these issues from the IRB office. Following this, I started the exciting process of designing my web page. I cannot say that this process has been completely hurdle-free, but with Ethan’s help, we have been able to resolve issues and I continue the journey to making this a very attractive and understandable tool.
Moving on, I will add data from my past and current projects to the web page. I will also be learning about better visualization techniques in R which can facilitate the information transfer of the results of different studies to the audience. Professor Deborah Whaley brought up an interesting point which I hope to address during the course of the summer: this involves finding ways to attract more visitors to the web page, and I also hope to find better ways to disseminate these research findings to the population that will benefit from this research.
Soumya Venkitakrishnan
AuD student/ PhD candidate, University of Iowa