This is a study of adults with unexplained chronic cough between 18-80 years old. This study is trying to determine whether a noninvasive vibrotactile stimulation device can help reduce cough symptoms.

The purpose of this research is to understand the effort needed to understand speech if hearing is impaired. Listening effort is higher in people with hearing impairment and has wide-ranging negative consequences across many aspects of a person’s life. The goal of this project is to explore factors that make listening effortful, with special focus on the need to repair perceptual mistakes by relying on context.

Paired sound and electrical stimulation can alter how the brain encodes sounds and the perception of sounds, as shown in emerging evidence from animal studies. The aim of this study is to develop measures for paired stimulation that can be used reliably. These measures assess the following aspects of hearing: basic hearing sensitivity and cochlear health, perception of loudness and pitch, and perception of speech and music/complex sounds. This will lead to a greater understanding in the hearing science community about how multisensory stimulation can alter activity in the auditory system and sound perception, which may lead to new techniques for improving hearing disorders.

The purpose of this pilot research study is to test whether a tool called “High-Resolution Manometry” can diagnose laryngeal dystonia (also known as spasmodic dysphonia) and measure how well treatment works. High-Resolution Manometry measures pressures from a small catheter that is passed from your nose into your throat. We believe that pressures in the throat might be different for people with laryngeal dystonia than for people without laryngeal dystonia, or with other types of voice disorders. If we can diagnose laryngeal dystonia shortly after symptoms start, we can get patients the treatment they need sooner.

We are investigating how paired non-invasive electrical stimulation of surface body regions and sound changes sound perception and tinnitus. Body stimulation regions include: external ear/behind the ear, shoulder, neck, forearm, hand, and upper arm. We aim to better understand the optimal conditions of this paired stimulation, which opens opportunities for applying this method to improving hearing loss or tinnitus. We are studying three groups of people: those with normal hearing, those with mild to moderate hearing loss, and those with tinnitus.

The objective of the study is to define quality of life in patients with upper airway stenosis after bypassing the stenosis with either tracheotomy or t-tube stenting. Participants complete surveys over 2 years to collect quality of life information.