Disparity Between Clinical Assessment and Real-World Performance of Hearing Aids
By Cord, Mary, AuD; Baskent, Deniz, PhD; Kalluri, Sridhar, PhD; Moore, Brian C., PhD ; Hearing Review,Publication Date: June 2007
Article focuses on accuracy in hearing aid assessment, and the disparities often common in clinical tests versus real-life performance. The main reason why most people use hearing aids is to improve speech understanding. Clinicians, therefore, often use tests of speech recognition ability to assess hearing aid performance. The authors contend that these assessments are often inaccurate in terms of success in hearing in noisy environments. The most obvious reason behind this phenomenon is that real-life listening situations are very different from controlled clinical test conditions, as real-life situations can involve talkers and listeners who are moving around, and variations in environmental noise sources and levels. Interactions can occur between certain types of hearing aid signal processing and the listening environment, while interactive conversation can involve more complex cognitive functioning than clinical tests. A wide range of factors surrounding hearing aid performance in natural environments are discussed, including: (1) visual cues, (2) aging, (3) listening effort, (4) individual differences/preferences, and (5) signal-to-noise ratio loss.
Published by: Ascend Media LLC (Website:http://www.ascendmedia.com)
Link to text: http://www.hearingreview.com/issues/articles/2007-06_02.asp
