Counseling Benefits of Real Ear Measurements

This is the second of three parts of the webinar “The advantages and benefits of performing Real Ear Measurements”. Amanda Goodhew, International Clinical Trainer with the Interacoustics Academy, discusses how probe microphone recordings such as Real Ear Measurements can be used as counselling tools within the hearing aid fitting appointment and rehabilitation process.

You can read the full transcript below.

Personalizing client care

In this video, I'd like to explore the options and possibilities that real ear measurements offer beyond the specifics of the hearing aid output. Let's have a think about what our patients or clients might look like.

First off, they probably won't be alone. Somebody might be accompanied by their friend or partner. The patient may be a child who relies on their parents to support their hearing aid used. We might have an elderly client who has brought their grown-up child or their carer for support. Or we might have a child patient whose grandparents are heavily involved in their care.

The point is, we can have several situations and in all of these, it's really important that the other people in the room and the patient's life are involved. Communication is not a one-way street. And all these significant others have a part to play in the patient rehabilitation process.

And neither is an audiology appointment a one-way street anymore. There has been a huge shift in recent years towards patient- and whole-family-centered care. Rather than clinician-led care, we have a much greater awareness of the need for and importance of personalizing patient and client care.

REM is one method of personalizing the hearing aid programming for the individual, but it has far greater reach beyond the hearing aid output. REM and its extensions are tools that can effectively engage the client in the fitting process as well as their significant others.

Visible speech mapping

Visible speech mapping in conjunction with REM provides a multi-sensory approach to counseling. Essentially, it provides a way of visualizing the patient's dynamic range and demonstrating the function of the hearing aid live in a clear-to-understand format.

Adjustments to the hearing aid settings can be made with the patient able to see the effects on the screen, which helps in making informed decisions, understanding the benefits and limitations of their device and its settings. And an unaided comparison is available to demonstrate benefit.

With visible speech mapping, our patient can hear their hearing aid, and they can also see what it is doing. This multi-sensory approach to counseling is highly beneficial in supporting patient recall, which is known to be poor across all age groups, but can be additionally challenging for the elderly population.

This visual display of the hearing aid function is a great tool for engaging the patient’s significant other or support person. Not only does their involvement further assist with patient recall, but this also supports the provision of family-centered care.

Listen to …

Performing a probe microphone measurement such as REM means that we can make use of the listen to option. This allows the clinician or the patient's significant other or child's parent to listen to the sound as measured by the probe microphone.

This is a lovely tool for building empathy and understanding and brings those around the patient into the rehabilitation process, which is vitally important so that they understand their role in ensuring effective communication beyond the clinic room. This setting of expectations for all of those involved will help make the trial period more successful, leading to easier follow-up and higher conversion and satisfaction rates.

Hearing Aid Transition test

Changing a patient or client from one hearing aid to another can be challenging for both clinician and end user and can risk being the point at which satisfaction and engagement is lost.

The Hearing Aid Transition test has been designed to ease this process to maintain the audibility settings from one hearing aid and then apply them to another. I'm going to let Dennis Mistry, a former Clinical Product Manager for the hearing aid fitting range, explain this to you in more detail.

Video transcript

This video explains how to find and use the Hearing Aid Transition function in your Affinity Suite software. To begin, you'll need to add your Hearing Aid Transition measurement into your REM protocol to use it. This is done in the protocol settings. Hearing Aid Transition measurements can be performed both on ear and in the coupler.

The Hearing Aid Transition feature has been created to help you retain the patient's audibility preferences from their current hearing aids during the upgrade process. It allows you to make measurements on their existing hearing aids which will be used as a target to fit the new hearing aids. This is beneficial when considering a few scenarios.

1: Upgrading a patient's hearing aid to a new one where you do not have their historic sessions. As example, they may not have visited you before.

2: Upgrading a patient's hearing aid from old to new but retaining their old audibility preferences.

3: Understanding proprietary target algorithms when changing to a new manufacturer of hearing aids.

All Hearing Aid Transition measurements are made in the dB SPL domain. Click on the Hearing Aid Transition measurement tab. And when you're in the Hearing Aid Transition measurement screen, you'll be able to measure your three new intensity levels, which will form the basis of your Hearing Aid Transition target. This is done with the patient's old hearing aid.

Once you've measured these, you'll then see that you're able to compare the performance against NAL and DSL target algorithms. This is simply a reference.

You can now exchange their old hearing aid for a new hearing aid and begin to fit the new hearing aid against your Hearing Aid Transition targets. This is done in the same way that you would normally fit a hearing aid. The target will specify a Hearing Aid Transition on the right-hand side so you know what you're fitting against.