Impact of Hearing Impairment on Independent Travel in Individuals With Normal Vision, Low Vision, and Blindness

Abstract

Individuals with dual sensory impairment (DSI) often have reduced independence in their daily activities. Vision impairment is consistently reported to play a more dominant role than hearing impairment on home-based daily living, while little is known regarding the relative impact of vision and hearing impairments on tasks such as independent travel that require interacting with more complex environments. To address this knowledge gap, we administered a semistructured survey in a convenience sample of 161 individuals with normal vision, low vision, or blindness, with or without hearing impairment. A combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches was used to analyze the data. Compared to normal vision, low vision and blind participants were significantly less likely to be frequent travelers. Low vision participants reported that vision impairment had a greater impact than hearing impairment on their travel independence, while blind participants reported hearing impairment to have a greater impact than blindness on their travel independence. The unique challenges in blind individuals were highlighted by their concerns on localizing dynamic sounds such as traffic during travel. Seventy percent of the hearing-impaired participants wore hearing aids and reported high utility for speech perception, but there was a significant reduction in the utility of hearing aids for sound localization especially for the blind participants. Our results reveal the interaction between vision and hearing impairments on independent travel and emphasize the need for an integrated rehabilitation approach for this population.