Child- and Environment-Related Factors Influencing Daily Cochlear Implant Use: A Datalog Study.
Tjeerd de Jong, Marc van der Schroeff, Jantien Vroegop
PMID 32769438WHAT IT FOUND
Objective datalog showed 59% of children used their cochlear implant more than 8 hr a day.
After combining factors, higher nonverbal IQ and oral parental communication were linked with more use; other factors were not.
Key findings
01The CI datalog showed a mean daily CI use of 8.6 hr, with 48 children (59%) using the CI for more than 8 hr per day.
02After combining factors, higher nonverbal IQ was associated with more daily CI use, and combined oral/sign or sign-only parental communication was associated with less use than oral parental communication.
03Chronological age, ASA class, CI experience and pre-CI acoustic experience were not significantly associated with daily CI use in the combined analysis.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included 81 children from one hospital CI centre, and the centre was a tertiary referral centre, so children with more comorbidity may be overrepresented. It was retrospective and used only the most recent datalog period, so daily CI use could not be followed over time. The datalog recordings lasted 30 to 395 days, and it is unknown whether this period represents usual use. IQ scores were missing for 24 children, and some IQ tests were done up to 6.6 years before the datalog assessment. The 2 hr and 8 hr cut-offs for inadequate and adequate use may not be representative. Awareness of the datalog feature may have encouraged families to wear the CI more often. The study measured associations, not cause and effect.
Declared interests
This work was not funded and the authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that sign language or combined communication causes lower CI use. This was an observational study, and lower IQ, comorbidity, and hearing experience may be linked to both communication mode and CI use. The study did not test changing communication mode.