The design of a project to assess bilateral versus unilateral hearing aid fitting.
Binaural hearing provides advantages over monaural in several ways, particularly in difficult listening situations. For a person with bilateral hearing loss, the bilateral fitting of hearing aids thus seems like a natural choice. However, surprisingly few studies have been reported in which the additional benefit of bilateral versus unilateral hearing aid use has been investigated based on real-life experiences. Therefore, a project has been designed to address this issue and to find tools to identify people for whom the drawbacks would outweigh the advantages of bilateral fitting. A project following this design is likely to provide reliable evidence concerning differences in benefit between unilateral and bilateral fitting of hearing aids by evaluating correlations between entrance data and outcome measures and final preferences.
Department of Technical Audiology, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden. stig.arlinger@inr.liu.se
Stig
S
Arlinger
Stuart
S
Gatehouse
Jürgen
J
Kiessling
Graham
G
Naylor
Hans
H
Verschuure
Jan
J
Wouters
D018592:Cross-Over Studies; D006310:Hearing Aids; D006312:Hearing Loss, Bilateral / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000628:therapy*; D046088:Hearing Loss, Unilateral / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000628:therapy*; D006801:Humans; D016032:Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic / Q000379:methods*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires