Acceptable noise level as a deciding factor for prescribing hearing aids for older adults with cochlear hearing loss...

Older adults often find it difficult to perceive speech, especially in noisy conditions. Though hearing aid is one of the rehabilitative devices available to older adults to alleviate hearing loss, some of them may experience annoyance through hearing aid and hence reject it, may be due to circuitry noise and/or background noise. Acceptable noise level is a direct behavioural measure to estimate the extent of how much a person is able to put up with noise while simultaneously listening to speech. Acceptable noise level is a central auditory measure and it is not influenced by age, gender, presentation level or speaker. Using this measure, we can quantify the annoyance level experienced by an individual. This information is of utmost importance and caution should be paid before setting the parameters in hearing aid, especially for those who are unable to accept noise. In this review article, an attempt has been made to document how to optimize the hearing aid program by setting parameters such as noise reduction circuit, microphone sensitivity and gain. These adjustments of parameters might help to reduce rejection rate of hearing aids, especially in those individuals who are annoyed by background noise.