Sound Storm AT

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  The Sound Storm auditory training programme for children with an auditory processing disorder: Efficacy and mechanism feasibility study

• IRAS ID

  253072

• Contact name

  Doris-Eva Bamiou

• Contact email

  d.bamiou@ucl.ac.uk

• Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier

  Z6364106/2019/01/12 social research , UCL Data protection registration number

• Duration of Study in the UK

  1 years, 6 months, 1 days

• Research summary

  Some children have great difficulties hearing and understanding speech when there is background noise, despite normal ear function and audiograms. These children may have an auditory processing disorder (APD). APD affects approx. 5% of children, who may have language, reading and school difficulties, and anxiety/depression . About 20% of children with APD cannot separate well speech from noise when these are further apart, in which case it is easier for our brain to separate and understand the speech and ignore the noise. These children have a Spatial Processing Disorder (SPD), which is a type of APD.
  Children with SPD may get better by doing commercially available the Sound Storm listening exercises on an app installed on the ipad. In our earlier study, we found improvements for children with APD, not tested for SPD, who did listening exercises like these. We will do a small study as a first step towards finding out if all children with APD (and not only SPD) would get better after doing the Sound Storm exercises, and how this training works to improve listening. We will recruit 20 children with APD (aged 7-11 years) and with or without SPD from pediatric APD clinics. We will give them the Sound Storm app to do at home supervised by the parents over 4-5 months (60 sessions). We will test the children before and after they do the Sound Storm on speech tests, cognitive tests, listening and mental health questionnaires and with brain imaging. Results of this study will tell us how many children we can recruit to do the training, how many will do the training, the imaging and the other assessments, and an initial estimate of the training benefits in both groups of children(with/without SPD). This information will help us plan a proper, bigger clinical trial.

• REC name

  East of Scotland Research Ethics Service REC 2

• REC reference

  19/ES/0019

• Date of REC Opinion

  10 May 2019

• REC opinion

  Further Information Favourable Opinion