Achieved Gain and Subjective Outcomes for a Wide-Bandwidth Contact Hearing Aid Fitted Using CAM2.
Tanya L Arbogast, Brian C J Moore, Sunil Puria and 4 others
PMID 30300158WHAT IT FOUND
Participants with hearing loss reported better communication and satisfaction with a contact hearing aid that amplified up to 10 kHz than with unaided listening.
Because the studies were unblinded and had no control, these ratings cannot prove the device worked.
Key findings
01After fitting adjustments, the contact hearing aid provided at least partial audibility for medium and loud speech up to 8 to 10 kHz, but only up to 4 kHz for soft speech.
02Relative to unaided listening, participants reported communication problems in background noise, reverberation, and ease of communication decreased by 28 to 32 percentage points with the contact hearing aid.
03Compared with their own hearing aids, participants reported 6.4 percentage points fewer ease-of-communication problems and 7.3 percentage points less aversiveness with the contact hearing aid.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The studies were nonblinded and had no control group, so subjective benefit and satisfaction may reflect placebo, novelty, or expectations. The comparison with participants' own hearing aids was uncontrolled because the type, fitting quality, and age of those aids were not specified. The satisfaction questionnaire was created for these studies, was not validated, and was not analysed statistically. Some participants and ears were excluded because of incomplete data, and not all participants completed all measurements. The correlations between objective fitting measures and subjective outcomes were a preliminary exploration and were not corrected for multiple testing. The participants were mostly experienced hearing aid users, but they had no prior experience with extended high-frequency amplification, so their preferences may reflect unfamiliarity. Measured functional gain at extended high frequencies often fell below programmed insertion gain, and the reasons were not clear.
Declared interests
This work was funded in part by an NIH NIDCD SBIR grant and by Earlens Corporation, the company that makes the device.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the improved reported communication and satisfaction as proof that extended high-frequency amplification caused the benefit. The studies were open-label and single-group, so placebo, novelty, or other features of the Earlens system could explain the ratings.