Clinical experience in hearing-aid adjustment by means of BER amplitudes

Assuming that brain-stem-evoked response (BER) amplitudes are correlated with actual loudness, the dynamic range of individual hearing can be determined by means of normal and pathologic amplitude characteristics. This permits an estimation of gain requirement and compression factor in hearing-aid evaluation. Clinical importance and validity of the procedure is investigated in a group of 59 children with impaired hearing. The method yields reasonable values of hearing-aid parameters, which are comparable with those usually obtained by speech audiometry.