Fitting tips

Nearly all hearing aids in the market these days use some sort of adaptation approach, especially with first time users. But what many professionals do not realize is that Oticon was the company who pioneered this development and the story is one of flexibility.

There is a lot written about the signal processing in hearing aids designed to improve speech understanding in noise.

Find out why not all communication related issues reported by older adults can be attributed to hearing loss alone.

Humans have two ears and there are a variety of binaural advantages that arise from this configuration.

One of the on-going challenges that all hearing care professionals face is to decide when to bring a new technology into clinical practice. 

A few years back, two different research papers came out in Sweden that, when viewed next to each other, provide a really interesting story about the effect of hearing loss on human interactions.

In the mid 1990s, the staff from the National Acoustics Lab (NAL) in Australia developed one of the most effective and well-conceived questionnaires in our field: the COSI (the Client Oriented Scale of Improvement). Up to that point in time, the outcome questionnaires that we were using consisted of perhaps dozens of items that may or may not have been relevant to the individual hearing aid user.

It is quite common to state the importance of establishing realistic expectations for the newly fit patient. And that makes sense, but what are those expectations? Patients are looking for help. Professionals know that amplification can provide significant assistance, but no set of hearing aids is a perfect solution for sensorineural hearing loss.

How much time elapses between when an adult first notices hearing difficulties and when he/she visits a hearing professional for the first time? The answer to this question is well known amongst hearing care professionals: seven years. But is that the end of the story?

 The answer to both questions is “sooner than you might think.”

A few years ago, we took a look at these two questions with first time users. We were interested in understanding what happens during the first month of use for someone new to amplification.