Healthy Hearing Program - Special Olympics

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Audiogram of Familiar Sounds
WELCOME TO SPECIAL OLYMPICS HEALTHY
HEARING PROGRAM
What is Special Olympics Healthy Hearing?
Healthy Hearing is a discipline of Special Olympics Healthy Athletes ® , which was
initiated in 1996.
Healthy Hearing began in 1998 and is designed for the following purposes:
1. To study the prevalence of hearing loss in athletes competing in Special Olympics
events, and to report these findings as a means of highlighting the needs of
individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities
2. To screen the hearing of athletes who participate in Special Olympics events;
to notify them, their coaches and others if follow-up care is needed; and, whenever
possible, to provide follow-up care on site at Special Olympics events
3. To teach and train students, audiologists, physicians, health care providers and
educators about hearing loss and ear health problems in individuals with intellectual
and developmental disabilities, and about solutions to these problems
What is hearing and hearing loss?
Normal hearing is a person’s ability to hear a range of very soft to very loud sounds
containing low to high frequencies (see figure 1). The sounds of speech are most
important for human communication, and of course are vital to Special Olympics
athletes’ ability to hear and understand coaches’ and officials’ directions and instructions.
Hearing loss is the inability to hear soft to loud sounds across a range of frequencies. A
hearing loss can make sounds too soft for the listener to understand speech consistently.
If the loss is severe, the listener may not hear sounds at all.
Figure 1:
Frequency spectrum of familiar sounds plotted on a standard
audiogram. Shaded area represents the “speech banana” that
contains most of the sound elements of spoken language.
Reprinted with permission from Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins,
2005