Evaluation of hearing aid fitting based on the patients' experiences from everyday listening conditions.

We found that a relationship existed between degree of sensorineural hearing loss and discrimination score obtained in free field with convenient hearing aids against background noise. However, the standard deviation was so great that we could not elaborate a diagram from which, with any reasonable degree of accuracy the expected discrimination score with suitable hearing aids could be predicted for each individual patient. Then 20 patients with sensorineural hearing losses tried different hearing aids under everyday listening conditions, and simplified speech audiometry against background noise was performed. We found that none of the patients achieved better discrimination scores with aids they rejected under everyday listening conditions than with aids they preferred. This indicates that we need to pay attention to the patient's experience with hearing aids under everyday listening conditions in each individual case, when a hearing aid is to be selected.