Clinical evaluation of a portable digital hearing aid with narrow-band loudness compensation.
A new portable digital hearing aid referred to as CLAIDHA (Compensate for Loudness by Analyzing Input-signal Digital Hearing Aid), which employs frequency-dependent amplitude compression based on narrow-band loudness compensation, was clinically evaluated in 159 subjects with hearing loss. The results of speech tests revealed better intelligibility compared with the subject's own hearing aids; the advantage of using CLAIDHA in daily life was also indicated by the results of a questionnaire completed by the subjects. In about 64% of the subjects with a flat, gradually sloping type of hearing loss, CLAIDHA was satisfactorily adopted for daily use. However, in the subjects with a steeply sloping type of hearing loss and subjects with losses mainly at high and low frequencies, with near-normal mid-frequency hearing. this loudness compensation scheme seems to be slightly less effective.
Hidaka
H
H
Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Tohoku University School of Medicine, Sendai, Japan. hi00@cc.tohoku.ac.jp
Kawase
T
T
Takahashi
S
S
Suzuki
Y
Y
Ozawa
K
K
Sakamoto
S
S
Sasaki
N
N
Hirano
K
K
Ueda
N
N
Sone
T
T
Takasaka
T
T
D000368:Aged; D005260:Female; D006310:Hearing Aids; D006319:Hearing Loss, Sensorineural / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D006801:Humans; D008144:Loudness Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D017755:Prosthesis Fitting; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires