Speech Audiometry - Essay Example

Use of hearing aids of many types and formats can bring normalcy and comfort to patient short fallings relates to listening and recognition of words which may result in improvement of professional capabilities, understanding relationships with others, self-confidence and self-satisfaction. Many researches were conducted in past and still going on for effective detection of primary listening disabilities. Scientists study speech as auditory signal to test new equipment. Since the advent of speech audiometry, it has helped in differentiating hearing aids from one another and so has come to be known as the basic assessment of the ability of hearing.

Due to the significance and accuracy of its results; it has also been considered as the foundation in the hearing aid evaluation of the majority of speech. Hence, speech audiometry became the centre of evaluation in audiology and the primary methods used now are the same that were used in the 1920's. The research for speech audiometry has not only been vastly useful but also is revolutionary in regard to the technological advances. Communication ability of a person is considered very important thus, continual research on the subject has been going on for the past 60 years and more.

The credit not only goes to the scientists but even to the military investigators, industrial development and clinical audiology researchers. In rel History: In relation to the hearing aid fitting procedure, speech audiometry serves its purpose through assessing the effect of occlusion, analysis of intelligibility, evaluation of quality, and degree of loudness. Comparative hearing aid assessments also used speech audiometry as the main evaluation of performance. In the late 1940s, speech testing started being used for evaluating and differentiating hearing aids due to its advancement speech audiometry quickly became the preferred method to evaluate real-ear hearing aid performance.

Speech testing assesses how amply speech is understood. Surveys conducted in the 1970s show that almost 85% of audiologists were using speech testing when fitting hearing aid. But after almost 30 years it was realized that these methods were not reliable enough to secure investment by selecting hearing aids in a large amount of clinical time.As the 1980s rolled on, use of speech audiometry in hearing aid fittings dropped to an exceptionally low level. All this was caused because it was seen that hearing aid dispensing is a much less time consuming process than speech testing and fitting approaches were the ones comprising of functional gain rather than speech audiometry.

It also lacked the sensitivity to distinguish small differences on an individual basis in hearing aid performance. The benefits received were limited in regard to the time taken to get to them. Due to the technological advancement of that time, the industry started using in-the-ear hearing aid fittings as they effectively eradicated the comparative hearing aid evaluation approach altogether. Recent Research: Eventually in the 1990s, speech testing was on the whole, rarely used for hearing aid differentiation and aided speech testing was