ANL helps improve the success rate of the elderly in choosing hearing aids

With the improvement of people’s living standards, people are more pursuing the quality of life, so the requirements for “listening” are even higher. Hearing aid It is one of the main methods to help the hearing impaired, and environmental noise is an important factor influencing the satisfaction of hearing aid selection.Difficulty in speech understanding under noise is the most common complaint of most hearing aid wearers, and it is also the main reason why hearing impaired people refuse to use hearing aids or put them aside.

For a long time, excessive noise when listening to speech has always been a problem reflected by hearing aid wearers. If we can objectively test the patient’s willingness to accept noise, clinical audiologists can use these results to accurately determine before fitting hearing aids. Predict the probability of successful use of hearing aids in elderly patients with hearing loss.Currently in the selection of clinical hearing aids,
Matching teachers often use pure tone audiometry, single-syllable, double-syllable and noisy sentence tests in a quiet environment to predict and evaluate the effect of hearing aids for the hearing impaired.However, studies have found that these test results are poor in the sensitivity of predicting the effects of hearing aids.Therefore, the acceptable noise level (ANL) test came into being.

The definition of ANL is the maximum comfort threshold of listening speech conversation and the maximum background noise level that the listener is willing to accept (the
maximum background noise level,
BNL) difference, measured in decibels. The smaller the ANL value, the greater the dynamic range of the patient, that is, the greater the absolute value of the noise that the patient can accept, which indicates that the patient’s ability to accept noise is stronger.

Since 1991, when the famous American noise research expert and Professor Nabelek of the University of Tennessee first proposed it, domestic and foreign scholars have studied the test for nearly 20 years.Relevant studies have shown that ANL can predict the success rate of hearing aids, regardless of the patient’s gender, age, auditory function, naked ears or hearing aids. It can be used in different language environments and is widely used in the clinical evaluation of new hearing aid technologies. .

ANL test is convenient, simple, and time-consuming (the test process is about 5 minutes) advantages, so that it has a high application value in the selection of clinical hearing aids.

According to the ANL test results, the hearing aid selection engineer can be guided from the following aspects:

1) Evaluate the effects of hearing aids and provide reasonable expectations for hearing impaired patients.

2) For patients with the same pure tone hearing in both ears but unconditional binaural matching, you can select ears with lower ANL values ​​for hearing aid matching based on the test results.

3) According to the individual ANL value of the hearing impaired, provide correct guidance in the selection of the degree of digitization of hearing aids (such as digital noise reduction, directional microphone, FM system).

4) Provide some guidance on the choice of cochlear implant or hearing aid: For some patients with severe or extremely post-speech deafness, if their ANL value is low, matching high-power hearing aids may still achieve the same effect as cochlear implant .

Link:      ANL helps improve the success rate of the elderly in choosing hearing aids

REF: Hearing AidsHearing Aids Supplier Hearing Loss
The article comes from the Internet. If there is any infringement, please contact [email protected] to delete it.

Leave a Reply