AUDIOLOGICAL FACTORS IN THE IMPLEMENTATION AND USE OF SIGNAL PROCESSING HEARING AIDS

Abstract

This study was done on 41 patients with bilateral sensorineural hearing loss. The New group, 20 patients who are candidate for hearing aid use for the first time, while the Expert group is another 20 patients had their hearing aids for at least one year. Both groups were matched in age, gender, unaided and aided free field pure tone thresholds with either analog or digital hearing aid. There was no. significant difference between the two groups in free field speech test with each hearing aid. As regards the speech discrimination scores in noise, the digital hearing aid perfonnance was higher than the analog one and the rule was applicable for both groups. The subjective feeling of sound quality and clearness was not significant between the two groups but was significant between the two hearing aids in each .group.. A single case of auditory neuropathy though did not show significant increase in discrimination score with digital hearing aid, yet she insisted on better hearing quality.