- Some hearing care professionals still aren't verifying
if they're programming your hearing aids correctly.
And other hearing care professionals are using
old-fashioned techniques of hearing aid
verification that are outdated at best.
So on this video, I'm talking about
the wrong way to program hearing aids
and what you should do instead.
Coming up.
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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
a better informed consumer.
So if you're into that, make sure you hit
that subscribe button.
Proper programming is critical to ensure
that you realize the full potential
of whatever hearing aids that you have.
I often say that a cheap hearing aid
programmed well is better than an expensive
hearing aid programmed poorly.
But in order to ensure that your hearing aids are
programmed properly to your hearing loss prescription,
you need to have the hearing aid programming verified.
And there are still a lot of hearing care professionals
out there who are using an outdated form
of hearing aid verification called
functional gain testing.
Basically what functional gain testing is is that
a hearing care professional will fit you
with hearing aids, program those hearing aids,
take you into a sound booth with a loud speaker
and play beeps from that loud speaker,
very similar to the beeps that you would hear
during your initial hearing test.
The concept is is that with the hearing aids,
you should be able to hear those beeps
at a much softer level, illustrating that
you're receiving functional benefit
from those hearing aids.
Take a look at this hearing test.
The Os on this hearing test indicate
the softest beep that this person can hear
at each frequency tested.
The lower these Os are on the graph,
the worst their hearing is.
If the person being tested while wearing
hearing aids could hear these same beeps
at a lower level as illustrated by the Ss on the graph,
it would indicate that the hearing aids are providing
adequate amplification for the patient.
This type of verification is only useful
to determine the softest sound that a patient can hear
while wearing hearing aids.
However, this does not mean that
the hearing aids are programmed correctly
for four main reasons.
First, unless you're talking to R2D2,
you probably don't care how well you're hearing beeps.
It would be much more useful to verify
how well you're hearing speech instead.
Second, functional gain testing doesn't provide
a realistic understanding of how well
you'll understand speech in real-world situations.
When a hearing care provider is programming
hearing aids for you, they're programming them
at different input levels.
So if you're gonna look at soft input levels
at 55 decibels, average level inputs at 65 decibels
and loud inputs at 75 or 80 decibels,
you're trying to program the hearing aids
to provide different levels of amplification
for each one of those inputs to make sure
that all of those sounds are comfortably audible for you.
When you're just testing these beep sounds
that are significantly softer than 55 decibels,
it really has no real world value.
Third, it doesn't help with precision programming
of hearing aids.
Best case scenario you're able to test 11 different
frequencies using functional gain testing.
However, some of the better hearing aids have
20 different frequencies that you can very
specifically adjust for to ensure
that you're meeting your hearing loss prescription
at each and every single one of those frequency bands.
On top of that, functional gain testing is
usually done in five-decibel increments
whereas in hearing aid programming software,
you can make adjustments in one-decibel increments.
And fourth, you may not even get accurate
readings doing functional gain.
There are different hearing aid features
such as compression that can have an impact
on your functional gain scores.
It well documented that compression,
depending on where your compression need point is,
that it can have an impact on what
the readings are in the high frequency range
for individuals who have a significant
high frequency hearing loss which is a lot of people.
All that being said, verifying hearing aid
fitting using functional gain testing is
definitely better than not verifying your fitting at all.
But it would be even better to verify
your hearing aid programming using real ear measurement.
Real ear measurement is the gold standard
in programming hearing aids.
Unless you use real ear measurement,
you really have no idea if your hearing aids are
programmed correctly to your hearing loss prescription.
Now if you want to learn more about real ear measurement
and why it's so critical to determine
your success with hearing treatment,
then I highly recommend that you watch my video
that I will link in the cart up here
and in the description below.
That's it for this video.
If you have any questions, leave them in the comment
section below.
If you liked it, please share it.
And if you want to see other videos
just like this one, make sure you hit
that subscribe button.
I'll see you next time.
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