Effect of an Aural Rehabilitation Program in Hearing-impaired Older Adults

The study will be an experimental design featuring repeated measures, with data collected from a pretest, a posttest and a follow-up test. An estimated total of 96 participants will be randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The experimental group will participate in a 10-week aural rehabilitation program (Hear-Talk-Activity audiological rehabilitation program), including provide information, hearing aids and assistive listening devices, communication strategies and skills, personal coping and adjustment, psychosocial support and stress management, consisting of 60-minute sessions once per week, while the control group will be put on a waiting-list group. Each group will be assessed of the outcomes at 3 time points: baseline (T0), three months following the intervention (T1) and again at six months following the intervention (T2). The investigators will use the Hearing Handicap Inventory for the Elderly-Screening version (HHIE-S), the 10-item version of the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (10-item CES-D), the short-form University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Loneliness Scale-8 item (ULS-8) and the Short Form-12 health survey (SF-12) as the outcome indicators. The principle of intention-to-treat (ITT) analysis will be used, and the result will be analyzed mainly by generalized estimating equation (GEE).