Fabry, David A.

AbstractThe Three-Clinic Hearing Aid Selection Profile (HASP) was developed to assess a patient's beliefs about a number of basic considerations felt to be critical to the hearing aid selection (HAS) process. These characteristics are felt to be key to the acceptance of amplification and include motivation, expectations, cost of goods and services, appearance (cosmesis), attitudes about technology, physical function/limitations, communication needs, and lifestyle. The results of the first investigation suggest that we have been successful in developing a 40–item metric with adequate internal consistency reliability that assesses the aforementioned characteristics. Second, results of the administration of this tool to a large group of individuals indicated that (1) age impacted scores on the Technology, Physical Function, and Communicative Needs subscales; (2) gender impacted scores on the Motivation, Expectation, Technology, Communicative Needs, and Appearance subscales; (3) previous hearing aid use affected scores on the Motivation subscale; (4) level of education impacted scores on the Physical Function and Lifestyle subscales; and (5) self-perceived hearing handicap had an effect on Motivation and Communicative Needs subscale scores. Percentile data collected from this subject sample are presented as a benchmark against which to evaluate responses from individual patients. Case studies are presented to illustrate the potential clinical utility of this device. Abbreviations: ANOVA = analysis of variance, CIC = completely in the canal, COSI = Client Oriented Scale of Improvement, DSP = digital signal processing, HAS = hearing aid selection, HASP = Hearing Aid Selection Profile, HHIA = Hearing Handicap Inventory for Adults, HHIE = Hearing Handicap Inventory for the Elderly

This study examined the possibility that hearing-impaired listeners, in addition to displaying poorer-than-normal recognition of speech presented in background noise, require a larger signal-to-noise ratio for the detection of the speech sounds. Psychometric functions for the detection and recognition of stop consonants were obtained from both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners. Expressing the speech levels in terms of their short-term spectra, the detection of consonants for both subject groups occurred at the same signal-to-noise ratio. In contrast, the hearing-impaired listeners displayed poorer recognition performance than the normal-hearing listeners. These results imply that the higher signal-to-noise ratios required for a given level of recognition by some subjects with hearing loss are not due in part to a deficit in detection of the signals in the masking noise, but rather are due exclusively to a deficit in recognition.

Hearing threshold configuration of the impaired ear was simulated, via two different methods, in the normal ear of each of six subjects with unilateral sensorineural hearing loss. The simulation methods were (1) frequency-specific attenuation (filtering), and (2) masking by shaped masking noise. Identification responses to 20 consonant-vowel nonsense syllables were obtained from the normal ear of each subject in both hearing loss simulation conditions, as well as from the impaired ear. Data were scored both for percent correct syllable recognition and for errors on a set of eight consonant features. Overall performance level and consonant feature error patterns appeared to be relatively independent measures of speech recognition. For three subjects, both masking and filtering successfully simulated the effects of sensorineural hearing loss on consonant feature error patterns. For the remaining subjects, one or both of the simulation schemes was inadequate. [Supported by NINCDS Grant NS-12125.]