Effect of Degree of Loss and Age on Speech Identification With Multi Channel Hearing Aids

Abstract

Digital hearing aids have become common, with numerous modern digital signal processing technology. Multichannel hearing aids are now widely prescribed. There is conflicting evidence on the benefit of multichannel hearing aids. The current study investigated the effect of age and hearing loss on speech identification in multi channel hearing aids. Speech identification is measured using recorded version of bi-syllabic wordlist (Vijayalakshmi and Yathiraj,2005) in quiet and noise, using five and fifteen channel hearing aids ,for two groups, fifteen adult and eighteen geriatric subjects who were again sub grouped into mild to moderate and moderately severe to severe hearing loss subjects. They Analysis of the results revealed that the benefit from the increase in number of channel is inversely proportional to the degree of hearing loss. In mild to moderate hearing loss subjects up to fifteen channel would not cause any deleterious effect in performance. The overall performance decreases with increasing age, but the geriatric subjects can combine the temporal information across channel with increase in number of channels. The degree of loss found to decrease the performance greatly with increase in number of channel rather than age.