Hearing Aid Candidacy
Each patient has different communication needs; that can range from difficulty hearing on the telephone or television, hearing a normal one-on-one conversation, to complex background noise environments, such as a restaurant. Not everyone needs hearing devices. There are many assistive devices that can be used either alone or with hearing devices to help these specific situations.
Therefore, is it important to assess where your communication problems are occurring, how often they occur and determine what options are available for you to solve your areas of concern. We want to see the whole picture of your communication needs. Each patient is different, just as each hearing loss is different. We customize our recommendations for your specific needs using the following…
TEST RESULTS
Speech Recognition/Understanding: Determined based on the accuracy to which you can understand actual speech when sound is amplified appropriately for your hearing loss.
Speech-in-Noise Testing: Hearing test that quickly and easily measures the ability to hear in noise. Speech understanding in noise cannot be reliably predicted from the pure tone audiogram or other standard audiometric tests.
Pure-tone Audiometry: Hearing test used to identify hearing threshold levels of an individual, enabling determination of the degree, type and configuration of a hearing loss through the use of frequency specific channels.
*Please refer HERE for more information on the audiological testing process*
LEVEL OF HEARING LOSS
Moderate Hearing Loss: Cannot hear faint speech, difficulty with conversational level speech, moderate difficulty with background noise.
Severe Hearing Loss: Cannot hear conversational speech, difficulty with loud speech, severe difficulty with background noise.
Profound Hearing Loss: Cannot hear loud speech, difficulty hearing loud sounds.