Rerouting Hearing Aid Systems for Overcoming Simulated Unilateral Hearing in Dynamic Listening Situations.
Erin M Picou, Dawna Lewis, Gina Angley and 1 others
PMID 31584502WHAT IT FOUND
In simulated unilateral hearing loss, neither hearing-aid routing system helped everywhere.
The CROS helped comprehension and when speech came from the side with simulated hearing loss. The remote microphone helped only when speech came from the front and hurt when it did not.
Key findings
01CROS improved sentence recognition when speech was directed toward the ear with simulated hearing loss and impaired it when speech was directed toward the ear with normal hearing.
02The remote microphone improved sentence recognition only when speech came from the front loudspeaker near the microphone, and impaired recognition for some other loudspeaker locations.
03For story comprehension, CROS was better than unaided listening and better than the remote microphone, while the remote microphone did not differ from unaided listening.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The children had normal hearing, and unilateral hearing loss was simulated with masking, so the results may not apply to children with real unilateral hearing loss. Only 20 children were analysed, and one child was withdrawn after poor comprehension performance. The remote microphone stayed fixed near the front loudspeaker, so the study did not test a pass-around microphone or a teacher moving through the room. Several sentence recognition conditions were near ceiling, which can make small differences hard to interpret. The open-fit eartip may have blocked some incoming sound in the aided conditions, which could affect comparisons with unaided performance. CROS and remote microphone conditions were never active at the same time, so the study cannot show what happens when both systems are available.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the CROS comprehension benefit as evidence that CROS systems work better than remote microphone systems for all children with unilateral hearing loss. The study used simulated hearing loss in children with normal hearing, and the effect depended on talker location and task.