Hi there, welcome back to Value Hearing's Youtube channel I am Emma a clinical audiologist
in today's video i'm going to show you what happens during the fitting of a hearing aid
at Value Hearing so we won't go into lots of detail but we're just going to give you
a bit of an example of what happens specifically actually when you get a custom hearing aid fitted
so the client i'm speaking off is actually Fred who you may have met a few weeks ago
in one of our earlier youtube channel videos where i got very excited about fitting the
first custom rechargeable hearing aid in the world and lovely fred was willing to let me record him
and what this video will show you is some of the steps that we take when we fit that hearing aid so
we do have another video coming that will go through what fred felt and how he's responded and
how he's coping with his new hearing aids a bit of a follow-up but today's video is really to show
you as i promised what happens in one of these appointments so i won't go on about it too long
but generally what we do when we have a customized hearing aid like that the most important thing
initially is making sure that it does fit the ear very well so we do take impressions
off the ear and we send them off to the hearing aid manufacturer but it doesn't always come back
perfect depends on the ear the person designing it and very much on the manufacturer as well
luckily here in Australia and i believe it's actually overseas where a lot of it happens
with starkey we generally get very well fitting customized hearing aids back
so that's one of the reasons why we do choose starkey quite a lot for customized hearing aids
fred's thankfully came back fitting really really well I was concerned that it would be difficult
for him to get them in and out of his ears with his limited dexterity but they're so well designed
they fit comfortably for him and something that we can't always tell straight away but
what we can find out after a few weeks is if they have good retention so if they stay in the ear
or is it a case of when he talks and chews does the hearing aid work its way out and that's fairly
common very fixable but fairly common thankfully for Fred he says he puts them in in the morning
leaves them there all day and completely forgets about them no discomfort
no itchiness and certainly they seem to stay put so that's been really good the next thing we do
in a fitting appointment is we do something called a real ear measurement
so what this is is basically just making sure that the hearing aids are prescribed appropriately
for our clients so when we enter the audiogram into the software for the hearing aids there
is a what we'd call a pre-calculation so in this case starkey would have calculated based
on Fred and his hearing loss generally what kind of prescription he needed in
order to achieve something close to normal hearing volumes for speech and sometimes
it's pretty spot on but sometimes we do the real ear measurement and we look at how the hearing
aids are prescribed and we realize they're not quite prescribed as well as they could be this can
be for some manufacturers they're just not as good as getting at getting their prescription accurate
sometimes it's just that ear is very different from average in terms of the acoustics of that
ear and this size and shape and elasticity and all sorts of things that can have an impact on that
sometimes it's the fit of the hearing aid as well that's slightly different to where Starkey or the
hearing aid manufacturer would have imagined it would be so we really do need to do these real
ear measurements to make sure that the hearing aids are doing what they say they are on screen
and that they're prescribed as well as possible obviously it is just a prescription so we do
ask our clients how it sounds we make sure they're comfortable
and clear and that they like the sound quality but the evidence is very very strong very very strong
that a really measurement can take you from hearing fairly well and being quite happy with
your hearing aids to getting the absolute most out of them and really noticing a great benefit
so you'll see with these examples basically with this real ear measurement with this equipment that
i'm using we want the thin line to match the dark thick dash line as closely as possible so as you
look at the screen going from left to right that is going from the very low deep frequencies of
speech across to the higher pitched frequencies of speech so base across to treble from left to right
and ideally for Fred to hear all of the speech frequencies as well as someone with normal hearing
we need to have that thin line matching the dark thick dashed line as well as possible
now i have to say that when i fit starkey often they actually are very close to target
so i will often run this test and i have to make very minimal tweaking to get it right for the
client when compared to some other manufacturers in Fred's case however it was actually quite well
off as you can see from this screen you'll see that this is actually full prescription from
starkey and this thin line is matching fairly well in the low frequencies for fred but not really
matching at all in the high frequencies for fred so if i'd sent fred off with this prescription
he would have been reporting a lack of clarity in speech he may have noticed some improvement
of course but unlikely that he would report a significant improvement with this
and so it did take a little bit of time but i managed to get it to match this well as you can
see we've now got these two lines meeting much much more closely across the speech spectrum
there is a bit of a roll-off which is what we expect won't go into the psychoacoustics of this
but this is generally what we do expect in most human ears but up until this point
we've got a lovely match and this is what we would consider a very very good match to target
not that does not mean that fred left with that exact match just simply because Fred hasn't had
hearing aids before that were consistently worn so we just reduced it a little bit to make sure
in terms of overall gain that fred was comfortable so we did push him a little bit he definitely
reported after two weeks the world's very noisy, he would not stop talking about his squeaky wooden
floor but after another two weeks Fred actually really started to adjust and still notice the
background noise but it wasn't bothering him quite as much so obviously a big part of the initial
fitting appointment as well is when we show our client fred in this case how to clean the hearing
aids and use them at their best and manage them so with fred it was going through how to charge them
how to change their wax filters how to clean their microphones and microphone covers
how to maintain them and how to get them in and out of his ears which is some of
the biggest challenges for people to get used to when they haven't had this type of hearing aid or
any hearing aid at all so that's a good chunk of the appointment is counseling and really showing
people how to be confident in using their new hearing devices sometimes we don't do all of this
in the first appointment we might take it slowly because it can be a lot of information in one go
so sometimes we'll prioritize what needs to be taught in that first appointment and certainly
the follow-ups are extremely important in those first few weeks for some teething problems and
reminders and hands-on practice and all the different bits and pieces that come with the
hearing aids so a lot of hands-on practice happens in those first few appointments when
we have someone who's very new to hearing aids or even just transferring from one type or one
manufacturer of hearing aid to another a lot of time is spent in the appointment counseling people
so counsel them on what to expect counseling them on how to optimize the hearing technology
so the hearing aids can't do everything there's a lot more to it in terms of communication skills so
we'll spend a good bit of time talking about that with the client with their individual situation
and the individuals that exist in their life and how to communicate best so i hope that answered
some questions you may have had about what exactly happens during a hearing aid fitting appointment
like I said earlier in a few weeks we'll have an even more interesting video on how Fred is
actually coping with his new hearing aids how he's handling them and how he's hearing with
them so thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed this content please like the video share
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