Happy Halloween - Kids and Hearing Aids
Coming soon, many of you will be spending an evening at your house welcoming the neighborhood kids dressed up as firefighters, royalty or a variety of zoo and/or barnyard animals. Many of you also welcome your youngest patients into your offices and clinics to help them hear better by fitting them with amplification. Getting an accurate fit with kids can sometimes be more of a trick than a treat, especially when (among other things) you are converting ABR thresholds to behavioral thresholds, or verifying the fitting using RECD measures.
We offer some help this month, by providing some answers to common questions that relate to pediatric hearing aid fittings. Experts from the University of Western Ontario, Audiologists, Marlene Bagatto, Au.D., and Sheila Moodie, M.Cl.Sc., have provided a great paper, Learning the Art to Apply the Science: Common Questions Related to Pediatric Hearing Instrument Fitting.
Expanding on Expansion
Expansion is one of those things that really came into play with the advent of digital hearing aids. The reduction of gain below the kneepoint with expansion took some getting used to by all of us who normally thought about reduction of gain above a kneepoint with compression.
Patrick Plyler, Ph.D., from the University of Tennessee has written a summary article of his recent research in the area of the optimal settings for expansion, Applying Expansion in Hearing Aid Fittings: Subjective and Objective Findings. Expansion settings that may be optimal for speech understanding, may not always be what a patient prefers to listen to.
Around the Web in 60 Seconds
The current edition of "Around the Web" (ATW) includes: Analysis of Beethoven's deafness, Beer and hearing loss, The world record in ear lifting, Hearing loss and farm accidents, Cell phones and hearing loss, Using MP3 players vs. stethoscopes, Noise levels in computer data centers and much more. Read about these and other stories in the latest edition of ATW
Until Next Month
Please take time to view additional AO news and information links listed to the right of this email and on our home page, and as always, thanks for reading.
Best regards,
Paul Dybala, Ph.D. - Audiologist
President & Editor
Audiology Online
