This study investigated the outcomes of an integrated auditory rehabilitation program for older adults with presbycusis who continued to experience poor speech understanding despite appropriate hearing aid fitting. Twenty-five patients (mean age 78 years) completed a three-month program consisting of weekly individualized sessions and daily home-based training. The clinical sessions combined direct approaches-sentence repetition, auditory comprehension tasks, and phoneme and consonant discrimination-with indirect approaches involving communication strategy training and family education. Home-based exercises included structured auditory training (“ear training”) and cognitive training (“brain training”). Training difficulty was adjusted adjusted for? using a stepwise protocol based on each patient's speech perception ability.
　　Speech audiometry showed no significant group-level improvement; however, approximately half of the patients showed individual gains in word or sentence recognition. Psychological assessments revealed significant improvement in listening under challenging conditions, along with better emotional and behavioral responses to communication difficulties. These findings suggest that integrating auditory and cognitive elements, combined with family involvement and individualized stepwise progression, may enhance motivation, listening awareness, and communication outcomes in older adults with hearing loss. Further development of standardized protocols and systems enabling consistent delivery by different clinicians is needed.

　　Preventing hearing loss is becoming increasingly important for reducing the risk of dementia - it also of great importance to address hearing loss in patients who have already been diagnosed as having dementia. However, the process of adaptation of patients with dementia to hearing aids is not an easy one because of the behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia and their fluctuations. Patients with dementia who were hospitalized in Akita Prefectural Center for Rehabilitation and Psychiatric Medicine were classified into two groups: those who continued to use hearing aids and those who discontinued using hearing aids. We investigated the factors that influenced hearing aid use. There were no significant differences in the gender distribution, mean age, perceived hearing loss, mean hearing level, types of dementia, or Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores between the two groups. Significant differences were found in the total score on the Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI) and the score on the subitem of “agitation” of the NPI. The results of multiple logistic regression analysis suggested that the score for the “agitation”subitem of the NPI may be helpful for deciding whether hearing aids are beneficial for patients with dementia or not.

　　We conducted a questionnaire survey (response rate: 64.6%) targeting 258 teachers at 99 special needs education schools for the deaf. We examined the implementation of Experience Books instruction by parents for 983 hearing-impaired infants (aged 2-5 years) . This study revealed the following results. 1) Experience Books were implemented by most teachers (96. 0% for 3-5-year-olds and 60. 7% for 2-year-olds) . Experience Books were primarily created by mothers (95. 6%) , while fathers and grandparents also contributed (14. 9% and 5. 7%) . This reflects the diversification of the childcare environment at home in recent years. 2) 73. 7% of language instruction tasks in Experience Books were adjusted according to the children's age. Language instruction tasks for 2-3-year-olds were used in 88.9%, whereas only 50. 0% of language instruction tasks were used for 4-5-year-olds. In Experience Books, it is necessary to enhance language learning by increasing the selection of language instruction tasks for the later stages of early childhood. Additionally, the findings suggested the need for comprehensive language support for parents, considering the transition to the school-age period.