Reduced hearing can have a significant negative impact on an athlete's ability to successfully compete and understand verbal information from coaches, teammates, judges, and officials.  Special Olympics Healthy Hearing offers hearing screening to Special Olympics athletes to assess the hearing of individual athletes and report to coaches and caregivers if any follow-up is needed.  Often direct referral is possible.

Special Olympics Healthy Hearing utilizes an approach similar to the model used by most school systems in the United States, screening athletes with an examination of the ear canals for the presence of cerumen (earwax) and utilizing an otoacoustic emissions (OAE) instrument that measures, without any behavioral signal from the athlete, his or her individual hearing acuity.  These two steps can be accomplished at Special Olympics events in a relatively quiet area and take only a few minutes out of the athlete's event schedule.

Our Clinical Director is Carolyn Garner from Indiana University.

If you are interested in helping at a Healthy Hearing screening, please contact Pam Eakin at (800) 742-0612 ext. 232 or by email.