An Evaluation of the Influence of Temporal Processing on Hearing Aid Outcome

Abstract

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of temporal processing on hearing aid outcome measures. The study was done on ten participants with mild sensorineural hearing loss and twelve participants with moderate sensorineural hearing loss. The temporal processing measures included were gap detection thresholds and discriminability index using temporal fine structure sensitivity; and their effect on hearing aid measures such as acceptable noise level (ANL), SNR-50 and self-assessment of hearing aid benefits were measured using correlation analysis. The results showed that the gap detection threshold had a significant positive correlation with ANL and SNR-50. The ANL and SNR-50 increased as the gap detection threshold increased; and that the gap detection threshold could be used to predict the ANL and SNR-50. The effect of temporal fine structure sensitivity on hearing aid outcome remains unclear due to larger variability in the data. The relationship between different outcome measures was assessed to check the correlation of ANL and SNR-50 with self-assessment of hearing aid benefit which showed that there was no relationship between them.