Optimization and Evaluation of a Hearing Aid in the Ear Contralateral to that with Cochlear Implant

Abstract

It is well documented that the individuals with normal hearing combine information from both ears in order to understand speech better in complex listening conditions and to locate sounds. Whenever an individual has hearing loss in both ears, it is a standard procedure to fit hearing devices in both ears. These devices can be hearing aids or cochlear implants or a combination of the two. The present research aimed to evaluate the benefit of using a hearing aid in the ear contralateral to that with cochlear implant on speech perception in quiet and in noise; and horizontal localization abilities in children. The measures Speech Identification Scores (SIS), Signal-to-noise ratio- 50 (SNR-50) and degree of errors on a localization task (rmsDOE) were used to quantify the performance on speech perception in quiet, speech perception in noise and horizontal localization abilities respectively. These measures were carried out in three different aided conditions namely; hearing aid alone (HA alone), cochlear implant alone (CI alone) and cochlear implant plus hearing aid (CI+HA). Results revealed that there were significant improvement in CI+HA condition on all the three measures when compared to CI clone condition followed by the performance in HA alone condition. Thus, it is research recommended that a hearing aid is to be used in the ear contralateral to that with a cochlear implant, whenever there is an aidable residual hearing in the contralateral ear, to avail the binaural benefits.