Hearing Aid Handling Skills: Comparison Across the Duration of Hearing Aid Use

Abstract

Hearing aid orientation is a very important part of the rehabilitation process for a person with hearing impairment, who use hearing aids. Negative impact of poor handling skills can lead to dissatisfaction, poor outcome related to hearing aid use and rejection of hearing aid. Only few objective tests have been reported in literature which quantify the performance of hearing aid users. The present study focused on development, validation and finding out differences in performance related to hearing aid handling skills among new and experienced hearing aid users. An objective test namely hearing aid handling skill test (HAHST) was developed and administered on 200 participants. Participants were divided into four groups with each group comprising of 50 participants with no experience, 3 months' experience, 6 months' experience and >1-year experience respectively. The results of HAHST revealed that hearing aid users with experience of more than 1 year performed significantly better than those with new and less experienced hearing aid users. Overall performance remained low in all groups of participants as compared with the results of previous studies. Other findings reveal that participants performed excellently for basic tasks and performance remained poor for those tasks which required more practice and also reveals that there is a requirement to give more importance on some tasks information related to memory. This can be attributed to more number of tasks included in this study and some tasks which contains memory related information, which new hearing aid users tend to forget with time. the performance was poor for those tasks those were infrequently used by them.