Published Daily Herald Monday May 15 2006 |
Hard-of-hearing adults not satisfied with their hearing aids could learn how the problem could be corrected by participating in a new research study. The study will be conducted today through Friday at Hearing Health Center Inc.' s Naperville clinic, 636 Raymond Drive, Suite 203, and next week at its Chicago clinic, 30 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1429. The most common complaint from people with hearing aids is that they can't understand what's said in noisy environments, said Ronna Fisher, Hearing Health Center founder. The study is designed to find out how much speech actually reaches a person's eardrum by using high-tech speech mapping equipment. "It's brand new. It just came out this month," Fisher said. "If it works, it's going to be beneficial to everyone." Fisher said a microphone is put in a person's ear to see whether speech reaching the hearing aid makes it to the eardrum. Some problems could be corrected during the testing, she said. "It's possible we can make an adjustment to their hearing instrument while someone is talking," Fisher said. The new equipment contains a sound library so it can simulate music, sound and speech in both noisy and quiet environments, she said. For example, if a lawyer is having trouble hearing in a courtroom, the equipment can simulate that type of situation. Digital hearing aids then can be adjusted to fit the conditions where the person is having difficulty hearing, Fisher said. While digital hearing aids are more adjustable than older hearing aids that simply made all sounds louder, a significant percentage of users still complain of problems that the new equipment may be able to pinpoint, she said. "No one yet knows how many patients are dissatisfied or why they are dissatisfied," she said. Study volunteers will attend a one-hour session for evaluation and testing. They will be accepted and evaluated for their specific type and degree of hearing loss. The hearing evaluation, hearing aid analysis and eardrum speech measurement will be free. The goal is to plot an ideal target for each individual's maximum ability to understand speech, and determine whether their current hearing aids can be fine-tuned to reach that target. The results of the study will be published in national trade journals including "Hearing Journal" and "Advance for Audiologists," Fisher said. To participate in the study in Naperville, call (630) 369-8878. For the Chicago location, call (312) 263-7171. sdibble@herald.com |