Hearing aid effectiveness depends on measured speech communication benefit, not loudness alone

Evidence

Hearing loss is organized descriptively into different degrees as shown in Table 7.1 as follows: normal, mild, moderate, severe and profound. A hearing aid, which electronically amplifies the incoming sound before it enters the ear canal, can be very acceptable and useful in one or both ears that have moderate or severe hearing loss, and to some extent it can help with profound hearing loss. In practice, the decision as to whether a hearing aid will be fitted rests with trained medical staff, and it is based on the extent to which amplifying sound helps speech communication. Acoustic hearing aids are far less likely to help those with profound hearing loss, and where this is the case, a cochlear implant is a possibility. — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 2682

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the descriptive degrees of hearing loss (normal, mild, moderate, severe, profound) and what determines hearing-aid candidacy.