Applying the Hearing Aid Fitting Standard to Selection for Adults

Abstract

The recent hearing aid fitting standard for adults outlines the minimum practice for audiologists fitting adult patients with hearing loss. This article focuses on three items of the standard (5, 6, and 7), which focus on the selection of unilateral/bilateral hearing aids, hearing aid style, and coupling, in addition to feature selection. The standard emphasizes that decisions around these three aspects should be recommended for a patient in an individualized manner, based on their needs assessment. For these decisions, the needs assessment might include measures of speech-in-noise ability, social network size, patient preference, and a trial period. Additional elements could include assessments of manual dexterity, binaural interference, and attitude toward hearing aids. However, there are a multitude of ways to practice clinically and still meet the items outlined in the standard. As long as the selection decisions consider individualized patient factors and are capable of meeting validated prescriptive targets, a clinician would be meeting the adult hearing aid fitting minimum standard guidance. In addition, despite the large number of past studies supporting these standards, additional, high-quality research including randomized, controlled, clinical trials are still needed to further support appropriate minimum standard recommendations.

Hearing Aid Benefit and Satisfaction Results from the MarkeTrak 2022 Survey: Importance of Features and Hearing Care Professionals

“…The high bilateral adoption rate is consistent with previous survey data, but also reflects that bilateral fittings are not the preferred solution for all people. 25 26 27 …”

Emotional Responses to Non-Speech Sounds for Hearing-aid and Bimodal Cochlear-Implant Listeners

“…For HA candidates, the configuration options were unilateral or bilateral HA fitting. Ideally, the range of emotional responses would be broadest under bilateral HA conditions, given the current clinical recommendations for bilateral fittings in most cases (e.g., Picou, Roberts, et al, 2021). For bimodal CI listeners, it was predicted that emotional responses would be most similar to those of listeners with NH in the bimodal configuration (CI and contralateral HA) relative to HA- or CI- only conditions, given the work demonstrating the benefits of a contralateral HA for emotion perception of music (e.g., D’Onofrio et al, 2020; Giannantonio et al, 2015) and speech (e.g., Most, Gaon-Sivan, et al, 2011).…”

“…Clinically, bilateral hearing aids are generally recommended for people with symmetrical hearing loss (for review of current hearing aid fitting standard, see Picou, Roberts, et al, 2021), yet patients’ preferences for bilateral hearing aids can be variable, with estimates of preference ranging from ∼90% (Boymans et al, 2008; Erdman & Sedge, 1981) to only ∼30% (Erdman & Sedge, 1981; Schreurs & Olsen, 1985; Vaughan-Jones et al, 1993). It is possible that one of the reasons patients might prefer a single HA over bilateral HAs, despite clear benefits for bilateral HAs on laboratory-based speech recognition tasks (Boymans et al, 2008; Freyaldenhoven et al, 2006; Hawkins & Yacullo, 1984; Köbler et al, 2001; Ricketts et al, 2019), is related to differences in emotion perception with unilateral or bilateral hearing aids.…”