Master Plan Hearing Aid Co.

425 South Cherry Street, Suite 400 Denver, CO 80246 (303) 355-0007 (303)355-2064 fax

Volume #7 Issue #1                                e-mail: bioear007@aol.com                                    Summer 2006

Customer Satisfaction with

Hearing Instruments in the Digital Age

By Sergei Kochkin, Ph.D.

Better Hearing Institute

              In a survey of more than 1500 current users of hearing instruments, half of which were digital, overall customer satisfaction was measured at 71% for hearing instruments 0 - 5 years old.  Customer satisfaction with 1-year-old instruments was 78%, which placed hearing aids in the top third of all products and services in the United States as measured by the University of Michigan.

              Hearing Care professionals received stellar ratings approching perfection.  Overall they achieved a 92% satisfaction rating.  Eighty-five percent of consumers are satisfied with the ability of their instruments to improve their hearing, meaning they are deriving tremendous benefit.

              The use of digital hearing instruments is associated with significantly higher ratings on overall satisfaction and benefit, improved sound quality, reduction in feedback(whistling), improved performance in noisy situations, and greater utility in a number of important situations.  Digital hearing instruments as a percent of fittings have grown from 5% in 1998 to nearly 90% in 2005.

              It is generally agreed that digital hearing instruments offer significant advantages to the hearing-impaired that 10 years ago were not available with analog hearing instruments.  These include:

• Superior signal processing (DSP) capabilities, increasing the chances that noise sources will be removed and that the instrument will capture and understand more of the speech signal, or that some sounds will be enhanced to aid speech intelligibility.
• Active noise reduction and cancellation and therefore greater user comfort in noisy situations.
• Greater flexibility in fitting the instrument to the unique hearing loss characteristics of the consumer.
• Better ability to reduce internal noise in the hearing instrument through suppression of acoustic and mechanical feedback.
• Superior optimization of microphones in directional hearing instruments.
• Better overall shaping of the frequency response.
• The ability, through datalogging, to use DSP to better monitor hearing instrument use, which will aid the fine-tuning process for some consumers.
• Overall cleaner sound delivered to the consumer’s ears.

In a double-blinded comparison of three levels of hearing instrument technology, 74% of consumers preferred the second-generation digital aid over a single channel analog programmable aid and a first generation, two-channel digital signal processing aid.  The advanced digital was rated significantly higher on word recognition, need fulfillment as measured by the Client Oriented Scale of Improvement (COSI), numerous listening situations, situational preference (i.e., speech in noise), and overall preference.

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