Proper Programming of a Hearing Aid

hi I'm Kim Keller I'm the owner of KNK hearing associates and with me today I have mr. Tim Schneider Tim Schneider is a patient of mine and what I'm going to be doing today is we're going to be programming or showing you how we program hearing aids at KNK hearing associates so that our patients receive the maximum benefit of hearing and understanding out of the best technology that we have available to to do the programming for them okay so what we're what we've got here now is we actually have Tim's hearing loss here so what we're going to do is we're going to go into the software the software is going to allow us to do programming of the hearing aids so what you're seeing me is going through the procedures to get to the software that will allow me to program Tim's hearing aids so we're going to go into the manufacturer and voila there's Tim now how did the hearing aid show up on this screen it's the magic technology with the hearing aids because these hearing aids actually have antennas in them and what they'll do is they're wirelessly connecting to the computer now what these hearing aids also do is they'll talk to each other and they'll let each other know what's going on on each side of them and they'll self adjust so as Tim changes his listening environment the hearing aids will work with him without him having to do anything with his hands the hearing aids Ottoman they'll make over a million adjustments per second so what we're going to do is we're now going to read the hearing aids now what this is is this is showing the programming graphs we're going to go into fine tuning and this is an equalizer bar imagine an equalizer on a stereo system we're able to move these up and down what I want to do is remember the graph Tim that I showed you of your hearing loss well what I'm going to do is go back and pull the graph up there you are we're going to set this over for your right ear we're going to get rid of that and then what we're going to do Tim is we're going to put a probe mic in your ear well what's a probe mic this is a probe mic and the probe mic is like a little plastic tube and when this is hanging on your ear this tube is going to go down in your ear canal and as it's in your ear canal that microphone that tube there is going to pick up all the sounds that are in your ear canal and it's going to send it back on this screen for me to measure now the sounds that are going to be sent into your hearing aid are going to come from this speaker right here these are the frequencies around here all these frequencies that the ear must hear in order to interpret frequencies of the English language the valves the consonants and the combination letters which are called complex sounds so what we're going to do is we're going to be playing all these tones this is going to be in your ear your hearing aid microphone that's already in your ear is going to pick these sounds up the sound is going to come out of the hearing aid into your ear canal this tube will be in your ear canal it'll pick up what the hearing aid is putting in your ear canal and then it will send it back to here for me to measure so that's what we're going to do now so right now what I'm going to do is I'm going to set this in your ear so we're going to put this up on the ear I already took the hearing aid out I'm going to take the tube this is the probe mic we're going to slide that up in the ear canal now we're going to take the hearing aid because the microphone is right here we're going to slide the hearing aid in the ear and now the hearing aid is in there with the probe mic so as the sound comes into the microphone goes into his ear canal the probe mic picks it up and sends it via the wire back to my diagnostic analyzer so now Tim's hearing aids are turned off we muted his hearing aids so we're going to turn this on you can see this line here is reading what's going on in his ear which is very little okay he's getting some low pitch help here but his high frequencies are doing nothing now that's what happens when a person has basically has a hearing loss and they're not getting the proper stimulus so these high frequencies are not up here so that means that information is not getting to the brain and we'll run this again now it's it's on again but on now I'm going to turn his hearing aid on and I stop it and you can see the difference in the two now if I were programming this for the first time I would pull this down by using these bars I would probably try to move this up but Tim and I have gone back and forth with his programming to fine-tune what he's comfortable with and Tim likes a little bit extra emphasis in these frequencies because it helps with some of his clarity and if I push these too far then it starts to sound a little sharp to him which can occur when somebody's been without proper hearing for a long time certain sounds become too much form and if it's too much for them then they don't want to wear their hearing aids hence the reason why a lot of people end up putting their hearing aids in a drawer somewhere because they've been improperly programmed so baez programming the hearing aid and using this live speech mapping I can actually visually see what we want to do to program Tim's hearing aids and then when we do this and we get it right once we hit target the way we want then we can go back and fine tune to the patients satisfaction on what feels comfortable in sounds to him and how well he's hearing and understanding and when we get that right we have a very happy patient

Channel: K&K Hearing Associates

Views: 45,850

Rating: 4.7948718 out of 5

Keywords: hearing aid, hearing, hearing loss, audiology, MD, PA

Id: 8VabqNBG9XQ

Length: 6min 19sec (379 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 02 2016