This boy aged 9 had been experiencing difficulties in school. His teachers' observation suggested he was experiencing sensitivity to certain sounds, a lack of sensory integration and auditory processing problems.
As part of our examination, an oto-acoustic emissions (OAE) test was carried out. The OAE test protocol involves projecting a series of tonal click bursts into the ear canal by placing a small probe inside the ear canal. The person being tested hears very soft, short bursts of static sounds. These static bursts are electronically bundled sound stimuli meant to vibrate the receiver hairs of the cochlea, then send the echoes back to the computer for graphing.
The probe gathers approximately 260 groups of echoes in order to produce a graph of the hearing response.
The first test shows that the left and right ear are not responding with the same intensity and 1000 and 1200Hz and again between 2000 and 3000Hz the right ear is responding more sensitively. A difference of this degree is described as a divergancy and can cause confusion for the child. The second test was done three months after this child had done the Opening the Door program. It shows that the strength of response has uniformly improved, the right and left ear are responding together at almost the same intensity and therefore this information can be much more easily processed and integrated by the central nervous system.
Before the program
After the program
The other graph charts latency or the speed of response at a given frequency. The left vertical axis shows hows the response to pitch or frequency. The low frequencies are at the bottom, the high pitches at the top. The horizontal line indicates how much time in terms of milliseconds the sound signals trigger inner ear nerve reaction. When the sounds reach far to the right it has 'resonance'. When the pitch has a short reaction time it is said to show 'decay' ie. it falls away quickly. A typical graph has low pitches of frequencies reacting for longer periods of time and higher frequencies stopping a few milliseconds. The high frequencies have a greater decay factor. The size of each dot is in proportion to the amount of nerve response. In a normally functioning one would expect to see thick blobs all the way down the first vertical line on the left side of the graph. This child's first test shows only a weak response initially. This considerably improved in the second test.
This child attentiveness in school has improved and his reading skills have progressed considerably since undertaking the Opening the Door program.
Shown below are the results of the oto-acoustic emissions tests for the right and left ears.
Left ear before the program
Left ear after the program
Right ear before the program
Right ear after the program
