Speech recognition with the bone-anchored hearing aid determined objectively and subjectively

Some patients with a bone-conduction hearing aid experience serious problems such as skin irritation or headaches and inconsistency in the sound quality due to shifting of the transducer over the mastoid. The Bone Anchored Hearing Aid (BAHA) provides direct bone-conduction and therefore evades these problems. Results of 58 patients fitted with either the head level BAHA HC200 or the more powerful HC220 were available for evaluation. Speech recognition-in-quite and in-noise tests were performed in order to make a comparison between the patients' performance with their individually adapted BAHA and their previous hearing aid. Furthermore, all the patients filled out a questionnaire, involving questions on speech recognition-in-quite and in-noisy surroundings. Individual comparisons of the audiological and questionnaire results in the subgroup of patients who had used a bone-conduction hearing aid showed that the results with the BAHA were comparable with or significantly better than those with the previous bone-conduction hearing aid. The results in the patients who had previously used an air-conduction hearing aid were ambiguous.