Hearing Aid Adaptation for Deaf Children

Hearing aid is adapted for the improvement of hearing loss in both adult and children with hearing disturbance. But the significance of adaptation of hearing aid is quite different between adults who have already perceived a sound and children who perceive a sound for the first time through hearing aid. In the present time, hearing aid is usually adapted to children who were diagnosed as the deaf. There are still unsettled problems how to use hearing aid for deaf children. Therefore, children in better hearing class or speech hearing clinic were examined for hearing aid effect to the pure tone. Speech audiometry was also examined under various conditions such as with hearing aid to contralateral ear or both ears and with different types of hearing aid and so forth. In the cases of a long term adaptation of hearing aid, the patients become gradually accustomed to wear hearing aid which they use, and unilateral ears with hearing aid also become accustomed to the sounds. Therefore, it is important for the patients to use hearing aid of good quality from the beginning. Speech discrimination score was not improved in 20 children who were examined for the effect of biaural hearing aid adaptation. The reason of above unimprovement is considered to be that they were not accustomed to biaural hearing aid adaptation. Therefore, in the cases of hearing loss nearly same extent in both ears, children should be trained with binaural hearing aid adaptation.