More than 1,000 delegates attended the nation’s premier hearing health event of the year in Adelaide in April. Here’s a glimpse of the action in our conference wrap.
A quarter of Australia’s audiologists were treated to exceptional presentations that educated, upskilled, reskilled and enlightened them at the Audiology Australia 2025 Conference.
Attendees at the event from 1-4 April 2025 at the Adelaide Convention Centre heard from more than 140 speakers including high calibre international and local keynote speakers, whose talks reflected the conference theme of ‘unite, innovate and evolve together’. Local and international audiologists, researchers, clinicians, consumers, ENT surgeons and industry representatives shared their knowledge, research, stories and experiences.
A buzzing trade expo with 57 exhibitors, pre-conference masterclasses, poster presentations and social events including a welcome reception and a conference dinner at Adelaide Oval, rounded off a “week of learning, connection and celebration for the profession”, according to Dr Bec Bennett.
Dr Bennett, chair of the Audiology Australia (AudA) National Conference Program Committee, said the organisation took a different approach this year and invited members to self-nominate to join the committee.
“It was wonderful, we received many applications and chose a diverse group of passionate, experienced people representing different areas of audiology,” she said. “They brought knowledge and understanding of what members on the ground were looking for in learning experiences and what topics they were interested in.
“While we covered a lot of old favourites, we also introduced new innovative streams and topics that haven’t been explored as much at previous conferences including artificial intelligence, neurodiversity, lived experience and new concepts for adult rehabilitation, all of which proved very popular.”
The committee tailored content relevant to 10 different personas of people who attend AudA conferences so there would be plenty for everybody and something for everyone, she said.
Dr Bennett said the program offered practical hands-on content, such as keynote presentations that unpacked the broader landscape of mainstream AI, complemented by a masterclass on using AI tools in clinical practice.
She highlighted that many audiologists regularly see clients who report hearing difficulties despite having normal audiograms – a group that can be particularly challenging to support due to the current lack of clinical guidelines and evidence-based interventions.
The conference program tackled this important issue head-on, with sessions where researchers shared emerging findings, clinicians offered practical insights from their own experiences, and a dedicated masterclass provided an opportunity for audiologists to take a deeper dive into how to better support this population in everyday practice.
Jointly opening the conference, Dr Barbra Timmer, AudA president, said a highlight was upskilling across these various topics, and connecting and reconnecting with colleagues. “We’re all here to celebrate and encourage strength in unity across many different areas of audiology that we all represent,” she said.
Brain to brain coupling
Founder of the NeuroTech Institute and FOCUS, Dr Fiona Kerr, who is globally recognised for her work on the cognitive science of human-human and human-technology interaction and how this informs practice, gave the opening plenary.
She described ‘brain-to-brain coupling’ or interbrain synchronisation which links one person’s brain to another, like neural networking. “When I sit down and chat to you, our brains are chatting too,” she said. “Sometimes you can guess what the other person’s going to say because we know each other so well we get what’s called direct ‘pre-emptive synching’.”
Along with oscillation of voice frequencies, this was why one person could pick out the voice of someone they’re close to among others. “When we hear a friendly voice, especially of someone we trust, it creates a sense of belonging and increases brain waves such as gamma, theta, delta and alpha, lowering anxiety and improving complex decision making,” Dr Kerr said.
She said research showed that respectful empathy with patients benefits both parties – it creates higher cognitive synching, which improves the clinician’s ‘radar’ for picking up nuanced information, and increases the information given by the patient. This leads to better decision making by both, including higher compliance or adoption of new habits, and the neurophysiological connection reduces stress in patients.
Dr Kerr’s research has also found that such neural synchrony is built in work teams, with highly connected stable teams having high levels of ‘interactive team cognition’ leading to being able to perform well in novel situations, and exchange tacit experiential information efficiently. High performing teams also adopt ‘microbehaviours’ of smiling at each other, listening to each other, offering opinions, and giving credit where due. The most important aspect of a highly efficient team is respect for each other, she said.
Dr Simon Kos, chief medical officer ANZ at Microsoft, Australia, said people were drowning in data but AI was like a co-pilot that could reduce administrative burden. It could transcribe meetings in real time, help with teaching, training and transcribe patient notes including allocating roles due to personal awareness of who is in the room. It was good at documentation, administrative and summation work and AI agents could be a virtual reception.
Medical knowledge doubles every 73 days
One concern is that consumer AI services often run offshore which can train on your data, Dr Kos said. Enterprise AI services, by contrast, are paid services where people choose their model, the service runs in their secure tenant, and their sensitive patient data remains theirs onshore and is not used to train AI.
While it should not be used for diagnosis and treatment, due to regulatory issues and inconsistency in answers, generative AI could be used for indirect patient care such as care co-ordination, research, summaries and the business of health care such as HR and rostering.
“Medical knowledge doubles every 73 days so generative AI can be helpful searching for guidelines, citations, articles, and to drive evidenced-based care, retrieving information in real time,” he said.
“Generative AI is new and disruptive and has enormous potential, good and bad. The technology is moving faster than regulation or legislation. AI medical scribes are unregulated so be cognisant of and cautious about that.
“Generative AI is creeping its way into audiology practices. There’s this sense that AI is something other people are doing, and I can think about it later because I’m not planning to use it yet.”
He said AI would surface in digital tools practitioners already use and responsible adoption needed strategy and planning. “Everyone’s baking generative capabilities into software that is already in use so it will start showing up in organisations that might not have considered themselves as at the forefront or ready to adopt AI, even small clinics,” Dr Kos said.
“If you’re a large organisation you need to think about what your policy is – some are even setting up AI governance groups. Even smaller clinics should think about what it means. Single practitioners are the most ready to jump on board because AI helps with the crushing administrative overload.
“While the science of medicine will be tackled by computers, the art of medicine is human interaction. AI won’t hold the patient’s hand and break the bad news, and it won’t be accountable. There will still be a role for clinicians for decades more,” he said.
Looming crisis
Dr Brent Edwards, National Acoustic Laboratories director, said ChatGPT could help provide summaries for patients, and big data was necessary to train AI so it was capable. “In audiology this comes from hearing aids, client records and office CRMs (customer relationship management) systems,” he said.
“All can potentially be accessed by hearing device companies and organisations with multiple practices, to understand patients better, enabling more personalised treatments. Clinical data is highly valuable and used to train systems.”
Millions of sound files, from Google and YouTube videos, for example, inform data on speech, to train hearing aids on what speech is so it can be extracted from background noise. “AI makes it possible for hearing aids to do things that would normally require human intelligence. Hearing aids now also include DNNs (deep neural networks) trained with millions of real-life sound scenes,” he said.
Dr Edwards said healthcare uses of AI included training practitioners, screening and triaging patients, diagnosing conditions, advising on treatment, assisting with administrative work, and monitoring and motivating patients. NAL’s Virtual Persona AI web tool, for example, enabled virtual patient interactions to train audiologists in communication and counselling.
“AI is going to transform hearing healthcare because there’s a looming crisis as the population is growing and ageing but the number of audiologists is falling flat and not growing,” he said.
“There’s going to be a crisis of care. More people will have hearing loss but there won’t be enough practitioners. The power of AI is it can offload some of your work so you can see more clients without lowering your level of care.
“If you don’t do it, OTC hearing aids will; if you can’t meet the growing demand, other organisations will. It behoves us to provide the best care and make sure we can meet that demand so patients don’t go elsewhere.”
Hearing loss and physical activity
Chartered psychologist, senior lecturer and researcher Dr David Maidment from Loughborough University, UK, has spent a decade working in hearing research. He said there is a growing body of evidence showing that hearing loss in older adults is associated with multiple health conditions.
“There is mounting evidence that hearing loss is related to reduced physical activity and physical function, so the greater your hearing loss, the greater your declines in physical activity, and this is independent of ageing,” he said.
“One study found older adults with hearing loss engaged in five to 35 minutes less physical activity a day than those without hearing problems. This results in up to 10 years of accelerated ageing, or becoming frail at an earlier age.
“This then increases the risk of developing more life-threatening chronic health conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and dementia.”
Dr Maidment’s team analysed data across 20 years in those with hearing loss versus those with normal hearing of the same age and found physical activity declined much more rapidly over time in older adults with hearing loss. One possible reason is that social withdrawal, caused by communication difficulties, may reduce people’s motivation or confidence to stay active.
“This suggests hearing loss is a key risk factor for becoming less physically active over time,” he said.
In a separate study, Dr Maidment’s team also found that hearing aids can act as a facilitator to exercise, as they help reduce problems with communication, but can also act as a barrier because of sweating or discomfort. Some people with hearing loss were concerned that getting hot and sweaty while exercising would impact on device cleanliness and increase risk of ear infection, he said.
To help address this, his team is working with audiologists to develop clear and practical guidelines on how to incorporate general health discussions into appointments. These include tips on how to talk about physical activity, how to refer patients to other health professionals, and how to advise on hearing aid use during exercise.
“Many audiologists told us they felt unsure about how to encourage healthy lifestyle changes in clinic,” he said. “They didn’t want to overstep by giving medical advice or risk offending patients.”
But there are ways to start the conversation gently. “Audiologists might say something like, ‘I’ve noticed you’ve mentioned being less active lately, have you thought about how hearing aids could help?’ and then offer some information that could help.”
Treating hearing loss matters to the brain
Audiologist and cognitive neuroscientist Dr Hannah Glick, an assistant professor at University of Northern Colorado, has studied brain changes in ageing adults.
“The brain is very (neuro)plastic well into our 90s but even in very mild hearing loss, we start to see the brain begin to change structurally and functionally,” she said. “The brain is valuable real estate and if auditory parts of the brain are not being stimulated as they normally would due to hearing loss, they may be repurposed to process vision or touch.
“We see pretty shocking neuroplastic brain changes happening even in mild hearing loss in older adults: auditory regions of the brain atrophy and there’s reduction in grey and white matter volumes over these areas.”
From her studies on function using non-invasive EEG sensors on the scalp to record electrical activity, she has investigated effects of intervention.
“When we fit hearing aids well to best audiological practice in mild early-stage hearing loss, we see a reversal in this re-purposing of auditory cortex by other senses, and a reduction in recruitment of areas of brain involved in attention and executive function,” Dr Glick said.
“The brain adapts and reverts to what it would be in normal hearing within six months of hearing aid treatment.”
In moderate and severe hearing loss, her research found that some adults wearing poorly fit hearing aids show persistent re-organisation – the brain stays re-organised and does not revert. “So, the quality of the fit matters, and likely the earlier the intervention takes place, the better,” she said.
In severe and profound hearing loss, users with good speech perception tended to not show as much reorganisation as poor users. “We think in severe and profound hearing loss, the brain recruits hearing areas of the brain to process vision to rely more on lip-reading and visual cues,” Dr Glick said.
“Our research shows that well-fit hearing aids can also improve cognitive function, including processing speed, working memory and executive functioning. In fact, our preliminary data shows that adults with hearing loss who have poorer cognitive functioning actually derive greater cognitive benefit from hearing treatment.”
Often, a patient’s cognitive status was not known but a three to five minute cognitive screening, which falls within an audiologist’s scope of practice, could offer valuable insights to guide treatment and rehabilitation. Ninety per cent of cases of cognitive impairment in adults go undetected, she said.
Another takeaway was people waited too long to treat hearing loss. “The average adult waits a decade with hearing loss before seeking treatment. We are waiting too long to address hearing loss.
“Not only can hearing aids support cognitive health, but they can also support physical health. There is research showing that hearing aids can reduce risk of falls. We need to be having those conversations with our adult patients.
“Audiologists can provide education about the many holistic health benefits of treating hearing loss. Improving communication matters, but cognitive and physical health are important too.”
Twenty-seven-year life expectancy difference
Tasmanian audiologist, Ms Dani Fox, called on her colleagues to help close the gap in services for people with intellectual disability. Ms Fox has twin daughters, including one with Down syndrome who wears bilateral hearing aids.
“Last year’s Disability Royal Commission found there was a 27-year gap in life expectancy due to systemic failures in the health system, historically and that is continuing today; 27 years,” she said. “I just want to pause and let that soak in.”
She provided tips on how audiologists could improve consultation and treatment for these patients which HPA will reveal in a future feature.
US patient advocate, Ms Shari Eberts who has hearing loss and has worn hearing aids since her 20s, said her father had the same hearing loss. He wore hearing aids, but the stigma he felt from using them isolated him and destroyed his happiness, she said.
“When I had my own kids, I saw them watching me hide my hearing loss and I didn’t want to pass this onto the next generation, so I started wearing my hearing aids all the time. This helped me at dinner, at the movies,” she said.
“When you have hearing loss it’s not just your hearing that’s affected, you may see yourself as less worthy, and because hearing is an active activity it’s exhausting. It’s hard work but it’s worth it.”
First provider sets the tone
Eberts appealed to practitioners, “if you are the first hearing care provider for a patient, that sets the tone. Your role is paramount in helping us overcome stigma and use our devices to embrace a new phase of life.”
Tips to improve the patient experience included having the patient’s partner attend, have a hearing loss-friendly waiting room with reception staff who speak slowly and clearly, tell them the audiologist will come and get them when it is their turn, and caption the TV.
“Spend a day in our shoes – wear a hearing aid and learn about assisted listening devices so you can teach us,” Eberts said. “Support the community – attend a local hearing loss support group for insights into what we’re worried about.”
***People who missed out on attending the conference can register to watch a selection of recordings from the conference and gain CPD until 31 August 2025 at audaconference.com.au/virtual-attendee
