Gonzales Faber (coursejoseph37)

With an ongoing shift from managing disease toward the inclusion of maintaining health and preventing disease, the world has seen the rise of increasingly sophisticated physiological monitoring and analytics. Innovations range from wearables, smartphone-based spot monitoring to highly complex noncontact, remote monitoring, utilizing different mechanisms. These tools empower the individual to better navigate their own health. They also generate powerful insights towards the detection of subclinical symptoms or processes via existing and novel digital biomarkers. In that context, a topic that is receiving increasing interest is the modulation of human physiology around an individual "baseline" in everyday life and the impact thereof on other sensorineural body functions such as hearing. More and more fully contextualized and truly long-term physiological data are becoming available that allows deeper insights into the response of the human body to our behavior, immediate environment and the understanding of how chronic conditions are evolving. Hearing loss often goes hand in hand with chronic conditions, such as diabetes, cognitive impairment, increased risk of fall, mental health, or cardiovascular risk factors. This inspires an interest to not only look at hearing impairment itself but to take a broader view, for example, to include contextualized vital signs. Interestingly, stress and its physiological implications have also been shown to be a relevant precursor to hearing loss and other chronic conditions. This article deduces the requirements for wearables and their ecosystems to detect relevant dynamics and connects that to the need for more ecologically valid data towards an integrated and more holistic mapping of hearing characteristics.Recent epidemiological findings of associations between hearing loss (HL) and poorer mobility and higher falls risk have increased the demand for ecologically valid experimental research to determine the potential mechanisms underlying human hearing-balance relationships. This review provides an overview of the laboratory-based approaches to studying human balance, identifies crucial factors that should be considered to improve the ecological validity of hearing-balance research, and provides a critical review of the scientific literature to date on the effects of HL on balance. read more Most present studies can be subdivided into those that examine balance changes due to the effects of (1) auditory suppression in individuals with normal hearing, (2) HL with and without hearing aids, and (3) cochlear implants in children and adults. To allow for meaningful comparisons, we based our in-depth critical review on studies that met minimum criteria of having at least one objective kinetic or kinematic measure of standing baships between HL, balance, and falls.The negative consequences of hearing loss go beyond difficulties with communication, having been identified as a major risk factor for injury and illness, social isolation, depression, overall quality of life, and mortality. Hearing loss affects the individual, their families and social network, the broader healthcare system, and the economy. Recognizing that there are multifactorial considerations associated with understanding and mitigating the consequences of hearing loss, great benefit is gained by taking an interdisciplinary, interprofessional, holistic approach to studying hearing loss in research and in developing holistic clinical strategies targeted at prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and social policy. Within the framework of this supplement focused on the role of ecological validity in hearing-related research and application, this article provides a general commentary on how ecological validity can be considered with a holistic perspective in mind. First, we consider how a holistic approach can be applied within clinical practice, how it can be applied to laboratory-based research to increase ecological validity, and how