Oh joy to hear that I’m not the only one to be asked by the audiologist ‘how does that sound’. My only good experiences of fitting have been with the NHS and a lovely guy at high street store Scrivens, who actually uses and said he’d not give up until my wife’s hearing aids worked to her satisfaction. For all the HAs my wife has tried, I’ve read the manufacturer’s technical fitting manual. It is rare to see any audiologist follow all the fitting procedures specified in the manuals. Everything seems to rest on the dreaded test. Stressful? Very. Inaccurate? Very. Work by the Institute of Sound & Vibration Research, University of Southampton showed that even in a lab environment, with researchers using ‘best practice’ fitting procedures and calibrated instruments, the difference in audiometry results could be as much as 21dB. If your 'HA is set up solely on an audiogram with this kind of error, it’s not surprising that it never works properly. What’s more, how often are you given a speech recognition test or a speech in noise test? Yup, the only test you get is walking into the noisy high street and realising the HAs aren’t doing their job. Strangely some HA manufacturers provide simulations of different noise environments. But they rarely get used. I’ve tested most high-end brands with standard NU speech recognition tests. Guess what came out best? An NHS aid. One catch: it used touch control. When my wife moved– with her long hair covering the HAs – the devices kept changing program. I contacted the manufacturer who said ‘yes we know about that, we withdrew the product from the market a few months ago’. It’s interesting that Phonak now sets tap control off by default for its new Sphere HAs. Going back to the stressful, inaccurate, non-real-world pure tone test . . . a significant improvement is to allow the patient to control what sound level equates to the hearing threshold for each frequency. If you can take your time, moving a slider up and down until you are happy that you’ve found the ‘null’ point for each signal frequency that is presented by the audiologist’s test instrument, the process can even become enjoyable. And one of several error factors gets removed from the test process. Once I did think I’d found a clinic using state-of-the art testing. It was described to me by Resound, in a 90-minute conversation, as one of the two best facilities in the country. At our appointment with one of these clinics, we were shown into a fully sound-proofed, dramatically lit studio with a huge 3D spherical array of speakers (to create realistic sound environments). We were really impressed until the MD emerged and announced ‘the F****** software has crashed again’. We ended up with, you guessed it, the same old pure tone test – this time in a less than quiet office. So yes, rants really are justified and the HA industry deserves to be ripped apart by the likes of Apple who are desperate to find new applications for their smart devices. Sadly it will take a while for Airpods to become more than just HAs for mild hearing loss. However, with the awesome processing power of smartphones and quality of Bluetooth earbuds at affordable prices (compared with rip-off HA pricing), it’s a realistic prediction. I must go: I’m testing Phonak’s Sphere I90s. So far, it’s been a nightmare experience but that’s another story which might, of course, have a happy ending.
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Poland
Scottsdale Az
North West UK
Canada (Toronto) YYZ
