Abstract
Bone-conduction hearing aids are only indicated in cases of conductive loss, such as atresia auris congenita or light mixed type hearing loss (20 to 40 dB).
We examined a new high quality bone-conduction hearing aid (Sensor, WD2001) applicable in cases of sensori-neural hearing loss. Eighteen adult patients aged 18 to 79 years old and 7 pediatric patients aged 5 to 14 years old were studied. Their hearing threshold ranged between 53.3 and 95.9 dB,0.5-2.0 kHz. The speech intelligibility (for words) of patients with profound hearing loss (more than 90 dB of hearing loss) who were fitted with this bone-conduction hearing aid was 80% on average. Furthermore, a bilateral fitting with an air-conduction hearing aid on one side and a boneconduction hearing on the other side was more useful for patients with profound hearing loss. Their speech intelligibility was 10% greater than with a monoaural fitting. In conclusion: 1) this bone-conduction hearing aid can be applied to patients with profound sensorineural hearing loss.2) A bilateral fitting using both an air-conduction hearing aid and a boneconduction hearing aid proved to be effective in this study.
