Comparison of Performance between Air Conduction Hearing Aid and Bone Anchored Hearing Aid attached to the Headband

Abstract

The present study aimed at investigating the perception abilities and quality ratings of speech with air conduction hearing aid and Bone Anchored Hearing Aid (BAHA) attached to the headband. The performance was compared with bone conduction hearing aid on a small group of participants. The study included data collected from 23 ears of I 7 individuals with bilateral hearing loss having either conductive or mixed hearing toss in the test ear. Sound field warble tone thresholds, uncomfortable loudness level, speech identification in quiet, speech recognition threshold in noise and quality judgement of speech were measured in three aided conditions i.e., with air conduction hearing aid, with bone conduction hearing aid and with BAHA attached to the headband. The results revealed that in the pr e-implant condition, both BAHA attached to the headband and air conduction hearing aid yield comparable results in individuals with conductive and mixed hearing loss. Though the performance with air conduction hearing aid was slightly better than that with BAHA attached to the headband, the difference is not significantly different in most of the parameters that were measured in the present study. Significantly better thresholds were obtained with air conduction hearing aid only on aided thresholds at 2000 Hz and 4000 Hz compared to BAHA attached to the headband. No correlation could be obtained in an attempt to find the effect of air-bone gap on the performance with BAHA attached to the headband and air conduction hearing aid.