SS01: NOISE REDUCTION IN HEARINGS AIDS AND ITS EVALUATION

OPEN CANAL HEARING AIDS- PERFORMANCE IN NOISE?

Marte Rønningen, Tanja Skjersli Lønseth, Elisabeth Ellingsen.

This is a study performed by two Bachelor students in Trondheim, Norway, about open canal hearing aids. The aim of the study was to investigate if these hearing aids improve the perception of speech in noise. The question in matter was Do open canal hearing aids improve speech perception in noise? Users of open canal hearing aids were objectively tested in a sound field. The subjects were tested with and without their hearing aids with the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT), which presents sentences in noise.

The subjects were tested with three lists of 20 sentences, with and without hearing aids. The average result shows an improvement in SNR threshold and a paired t-test indicates that this improvement is significant.