- Did you know that there's a way to determine
how well you should be hearing in background noise?
Well in this video, I'm talking about speech and noise
testing, why it's so critical, and what you can do
to improve your performance in background noise,
coming up.
(upbeat music)
Hi guys, Cliff Olson, Doctor of Audiology,
and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions
in Anthem, Arizona, and on this channel
I cover a bunch of hearing related information
to help make you better informed consumer.
So if you're in to that, consider hitting
the subscribe button.
If you have a hearing loss, you've likely experienced
difficulty in background noise situations,
and traditional hearing tests are not
an accurate assessment of how well you should
be performing in background noise.
This is why speech and noise testing is so critical
to perform inside of these hearing evaluations.
And one of the most popular forms of these tests
is called the quick speech and noise test,
otherwise known as the quicksin.
Why is it called the quicksin?
Well, because it's quick.
How does the quicksin test work?
Basically, we play you sentences at an audible level
and we have you repeat those sentences back to us,
but with each sentence, the background noise
gets louder and louder and louder.
This can even get to the point where even someone
who has normal hearing will have difficulty
repeating those sentences.
This background noise is typical of what you would find
in a noisy restaurant, and when we score this test,
we're taking how many words you got correct
when repeating those sentences back to us,
and we subtract it from a baseline score.
So what does the quicksin test tell us?
First, it tells us how well you should be performing
in a background noise situation.
Second, it listens to evaluate if additional
high frequency will either improve your score,
or decrease your score.
And third, it lets us know if we need
to recommend something additional other than
just traditional hearing aids.
The scores that I talked about earlier
will range anywhere from zero to 26.
If you score a zero, it means you hear better
than a normal hearing person in a background noise
situation, and if you score a 26, it basically means
that if there's any background noise whatsoever,
you're not able to understand a thing.
This score is ultimately telling us your SNR loss,
or signal to noise ratio loss.
Now I know what you're thinking.
You're probably thinking, "What is SNR loss?"
Well, let me explain.
The definition of SNR loss is the increase in signal
to noise ration required by a hearing impaired individual
to understand speech and noise compared
to a normal hearing individual.
Basically, it indicates to us how much separation
we need in speech from background noise.
Someone who has normal hearing needs much less separation.
Someone who has really bad hearing in noise
needs a larger separation.
For instance, if a normal hearing individual
scored a two on this test, and you scored an eight
on this test, it would require you six more decibels
in speech in order to separate it from the background noise.
Six decibels is a big deal.
It basically means that the speech signal
that you're trying to hear needs to be one-and-a-half times
louder than the background noise so you can understand it.
Knowing the score is critical for a hearing care
professional to understand what treatment
is necessary to help you hear better in noise.
This can be anything from a better hearing aid
all the way to an assistive listening device.
In a study by Leavitt and Flexer in 2012,
they measured the SNR loss of participants
wearing hearing aids fit without using real ear measures
which is in the black bars, versus hearing aids
fit with real ear measures, which is in the gray bars.
The smaller the bars, the better the SNR loss,
and the better you would expect to perform
in background noise.
As you can see, hearing aids fit using
real ear measurement, indicated by the gray bars,
perform significantly better than those without,
and if hearing aids are not fit using real ear measurement,
then they don't even out perform a 10-year-old
analog hearing aid.
Now if you don't know what real ear measurement is,
then I highly recommend that you watch my video
that I will link in the card up here
and in the description below,
because it is the single most important factor
to determine how well you will perform with hearing aids,
particularly in a background noise situation,
and I would highly recommend not buying hearing aids
from anyone who doesn't do real ear measurement.
And finally, if you want to get even more improvement
than a good hearing aid fit using real ear measurement,
then you have to use some kind of an assistive
listening device.
Now when I'm talking about an assistive listening device,
I'm talking about something like a remote microphone.
A remote microphone you'll actually take
and you'll clip on the shirt of the person
that you want to hear.
Once you get it on their shirt, their speech
is six inches away from that microphone,
and then that microphone will send that sound
directly into your hearing aids, bypassing all
that noise that would mix in with it along the way.
These things have a massive impact on your ability
to hear better in a background noise situation,
and it is way better to use one of these
than to use even the best hearing aid on the market.
The bottom line is that you need to know
what your signal to noise ration loss score is.
If you don't have this score, then your hearing care
professional does not know whether it's you
or whether it's your technology that is restricting
your ability to hear better in a background noise
situation.
That's it for this video.
If you have any questions, leave them in the comments
section below.
If you liked the video, please share it.
And if you want to see other videos just like this one,
go ahead and hit that subscribe button.
I'll see you next time.
(gentle upbeat music)