Who Are Hidden Hearing?
|
|||||||||
 |
|
|||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
|
||||||||
|
Interpreting Hearing test results
Your hearing test results
Once a hearing test has been completed, your hearing care professional will take time to explain the test results to you. They will have just used the audiometer and headphones to establish what the quietest sounds are you can hear over a range of frequencies. This can be plotted on a graph or chart called an audiogram.
The shape and direction of the audiogram can tell us a lot about the condition of your hearing, why you may be having difficulties hearing and it is a good indicator of how well you will hear with amplification.
The audiogram test result shown here is typical of a patient who exhibits a mild to moderate hearing loss. This person may have had problems with their hearing for some years and has only just asked for a hearing test.
The blue crosses represent responses for the left ear and the red circles show response for the right ear. All this information is useful to establish what type of hearing loss the patient may have.
Degrees of Hearing loss
The audiogram is broken down for you here. The frequencies across the top can be described as the pitch and the numbers down the side show the loudness.
Generally speaking, the further down the graph your results go, the worse the hearing loss – as shown by the descriptions down the right hand side. Your hearing aid audiologist may point out that the slope of the audiogram is also important. Typically clients don’t hear high frequency (pitch) sounds as well as low frequency ones.
So how can this affect you?
Once we overlay sounds on the audiogram, it will be easier to understand why you may hear some sounds but not others.
Most importantly, the grey shaded area here is called the speech banana and shows that different vowel and consonant sounds are spread across the audiogram. In other words, the different vowel and consonant sounds that we use have different pitches and loudness scales and this is how we set them apart.
An audiogram of a hearing impaired patient may slash straight through the speech banana so that some word sounds remain audible and some are not. Rather than not being able to hear anything, this person will report a lack of clarity – especially in background noise.
Amplification may help here and at Hidden Hearing we often refer to the audiogram as an important part, but not the whole story. We need to listen and learn from you what your preferences may be and what you would like to use a hearing aid for. It is also important at this stage to be realistic with your expectations.
|
||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||
|