TELEINTERVENTION GUIDED BY VIDEOFEEDBACK FOR FAMILIES OF HARD OF HEARING CHILDREN
Correction of Hearing Impairment. Family. Formative Feedback. Audiovisual Aids. Remote Consultation.
Therapeutic protocols that optimize development results in the hearing-impaired child population still lack evidence. Videofeedback is a low-cost, easily accessible technology procedure that can improve communication between family and child, with impacts on their development. Its use through telepractice can transform the provision of specialized therapies for this population. Therefore, the present study aimed to analyze the effectiveness of a remote intervention program with videofeedback to improve interaction between families and hard of hearing children. This is, therefore, a quasi-experimental intervention study, with a convenience sample based on the availability of families to participate in teleconsultation sessions, consisting of 12 families using a hearing health service, divided into control and experimental groups, evaluated pre- and post-intervention by researchers blind to the study. Families and children were characterized using secondary data from medical records and questionnaires and clinical assessments. The variables analyzed in the pre and post moments were those referring to the evaluation of the interaction between the family and their child, recorded on video. The intervention program through telepractice consisted of 10 intensive, sequential sessions. Prior to the main study, a single-case pilot study was carried out to calibrate the research procedures, presented as Article 1.In the pilot study (Article 1), reliable change and clinical significance were observed for the mother's behaviors and reliable change for the child's receptive and expressive language behaviors, indicating the potential of the proposed model. In the intervention study (Article 2), a statistically significant difference was found between the control and experimental groups in the pre- and post-intervention moments (p <0.01). Among the variables highlighted in family-child interaction (general assessment of the caregiver's communicative competence, tuned interaction, intrusiveness, solution of breaks in communication and syntactic expansion) it was observed that both in the EG and in the CG some families behaved as outliers, however, reliable clinical change was found in the families in the experimental group in relation to the control group and clinical significance for some of the families in the EG. It is concluded that the intervention guided by videofeedback mediated by telepractice is effective, highlighting the improvement of interactions between families and their hard of hearing children and the potential of this tool for optimizing results in clinical pediatric auditory rehabilitation programs.