understanding sensory loss
Understand Sensory Loss
Sensory impairment is when one of your senses such as sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste and spatial awareness are no longer normal.
A person does not necessarily have full loss of a sense to be sensory impaired. Dual sensory impairment is when a combination of both hearing and sight is impaired. The combination of two sensory impairments intensify the impact of each other which usually means the person will not benefit fully from the services of deaf people or from the services of blind people and therefore they require the services with a different approach. Deafblindness is a complex disability and requires specialist communication methods to enable communication to be possible. Deafblindness has effects in all areas of a person’s development, in language development, conceptual and motor development and the behaviour and personality of a person.
There are two types of sensory loss, congenital and acquired. Congenital means that you are born with that sensory loss/impairment. Whereas acquired means that the sensory loss has developed over time or as a result of something else.
Someone may be born with congenital sensory loss if for example the mother contracted an infection during pregnancy such as rubella or if there was birth trauma resulting in cerebral palsy. Somebody who acquires sensory loss condition develops this because of things such as glaucoma or as a result of a head injury or an infection such as meningitis.
95% of what we learn about the world around us comes from our sight and our hearing. We talk to each other, we read and we listen. Much of what we hear and see we take for granted but it is important as it lets us know what is going on around us such as tyres on a road, people chatting, rain on the windows, peoples facial expressions and body language. We can go outside and move freely and our senses help us to interpret when danger is near without us really having to think much. Most people
Sensory impairment is when one of your senses such as sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste and spatial awareness are no longer normal.
A person does not necessarily have full loss of a sense to be sensory impaired. Dual sensory impairment is when a combination of both hearing and sight is impaired. The combination of two sensory impairments intensify the impact of each other which usually means the person will not benefit fully from the services of deaf people or from the services of blind people and therefore they require the services with a different approach. Deafblindness is a complex disability and requires specialist communication methods to enable communication to be possible. Deafblindness has effects in all areas of a person’s development, in language development, conceptual and motor development and the behaviour and personality of a person.
There are two types of sensory loss, congenital and acquired. Congenital means that you are born with that sensory loss/impairment. Whereas acquired means that the sensory loss has developed over time or as a result of something else.
Someone may be born with congenital sensory loss if for example the mother contracted an infection during pregnancy such as rubella or if there was birth trauma resulting in cerebral palsy. Somebody who acquires sensory loss condition develops this because of things such as glaucoma or as a result of a head injury or an infection such as meningitis.
95% of what we learn about the world around us comes from our sight and our hearing. We talk to each other, we read and we listen. Much of what we hear and see we take for granted but it is important as it lets us know what is going on around us such as tyres on a road, people chatting, rain on the windows, peoples facial expressions and body language. We can go outside and move freely and our senses help us to interpret when danger is near without us really having to think much. Most people