Beyond the Audiogram: Identifying and Modeling Patterns of Hearing Deficits

The choice of a hearing aid and its tuning parameters should benefit from a more detailed assessment of a patient?s hearing than that occurs at present in clinical practice. The process of fitting and tuning might be facilitated even more if these data were used to generate a computer model of the patient?s hearing. A number of hearing impaired patients have been tested using a range of tests that were devised to be easy to administer under automatic computer control and easy for the, often elderly, listeners to use. The principal finding is that there is an unexpected variation among patients in the patterns of impairment that are revealed by the tests. This is true even when the patients have similar audiograms. The data have been used to develop individual computer models of the patients? hearing which we call ?hearing dummies.? These dummies have been successfully evaluated using the same automated tests that were used to collect the original data. The creation of these dummies raises interesting questions about the basis of different forms of hearing pathology and point to a future where all forms of hearing impairment and their treatment might be diagnosed in terms of the underlying pathology rather than the symptomatology as at present.