American Journal of Audiology Vol.16 118-129 December 2007. doi:10.1044/1059-0889(2007/016)
© American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
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Research and Technology | Article

Objective and Subjective Hearing Aid Assessment Outcomes

Lisa Lucks Mendel

The University of Memphis, Memphis, TN

Contact author: Lisa Lucks Mendel, School of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology, The University of Memphis, 807 Jefferson Avenue, Memphis, TN 38105. E-mail: lmendel{at}memphis.edu.

Purpose: To determine whether specific sentence recognition assessments were sensitive enough to serve as objective outcome measurements that document subjective improvements in speech understanding with hearing aids.

Method: The Revised Speech Perception in Noise test (R-SPIN; R. C. Bilger, J. M. Nuetzel, W. M. Rabinowitz, & C. Rzeczkowski, 1984), the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT; M. Nilsson, S. D. Soli, & J. A. Sullivan, 1994), and the Quick Speech-in-Noise test (QuickSIN; Etymotic Research, 2001; M. C. Killion, P. A. Niquette, G. I. Gudmundsen, L. J. Revit, & S. Banerjee, 2004) were administered to 21 hearing aid users to determine whether the tests could adequately document improvements in speech understanding with hearing aids compared with the research participants' self-assessments of their own performance. Comparisons were made between unaided and aided performance on these sentence tests and on the Hearing Aid Performance Inventory (HAPI; B. E. Walden, M. Demorest, & E. Hepler, 1984).

Results: The R-SPIN, the HINT Quiet threshold, and the QuickSIN signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) loss were the most sensitive of the sentence recognition tests to objectively assess improvements in speech perception performance with hearing aids. Comparisons among the subjective and objective outcome measures documented that HAPI ratings improved as performance on the R-SPIN, the HINT Quiet threshold, and the QuickSIN SNR loss improved.

Conclusions: Objective documentation of subjective impressions is essential for determining the efficacy of treatment outcomes in hearing aid fitting. The findings reported here more clearly define the relationship between objective and subjective outcome measures in an attempt to better define true hearing aid benefit.

Key Words: outcomes, hearing aids, speech recognition


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