Binaural Application of the Bone-Anchored Hearing Aid

Abstract

Most, but not all, hearing-impaired patients with air conduction hearing aids prefer binaural amplification instead of monaural amplification. The binaural application of the bone conduction hearing aid is more disputable, because the attenuation (in decibels) of sound waves across the skull is so small (10 dB) that even one bone conduction hearing aid will stimulate both cochleas approximately to the same extent. Binaural fitting of the bone-anchored hearing aid was studied in three experienced bone-anchored hearing aid users. The experiments showed that sound localization, and speech recognition in quiet and also under certain noisy conditions improved significantly with binaural listening compared to the monaural listening condition. On the average, the percentage of correct identifications (within 45°) in the sound localization experiment improved by 53% with binaural listening; the speech reception threshold in quiet improved by 4.4 dB. The binaural advantage in the speech-in-noise test was comparable to that of a control group of subjects with normal hearing listening monaurally versus binaurally. The improvements in the scores were ascribed to diotic summation (improved speech recognition in quiet) and the ability to separate sounds in the binaural listening condition (improved sound localization and improved speech recognition in noise whenever the speech and noise signals came from different directions). All three patients preferred the binaural bone-anchored hearing aids and used them all day.