Complete Hearing Evaluation
Doctors Hearing offers complete hearing evaluations. Monitoring your hearing abilities is important to your overall health and well-being. Untreated hearing loss has been linked to a number of issues, ranging from mental health to physical safety. Our complete hearing evaluations will provide crucial information about your current hearing abilities and whether you could benefit from hearing technology.
What to Expect from Our Hearing Tests
We will ask questions about your medical background. This helps us find out if the hearing loss is due to an underlying medical cause.
We'll test your eyes with an otoscope, a tool that lets us look at the ear canal and eardrum to decide whether there are blockages or anything unusual that might be causing a hearing issue.
There are three main tests that we perform:
- Pure-tone audiometry: In your headphones, we will play a bank of sounds at various pitches and volumes, and you will raise your hand after hearing them.
- Speech recognition: This measures the ability to understand speech.
- Tympanometry: This test helps us decide whether there is fluid in the middle ear that shouldn't be there. Fluid in the ear is a common cause of hearing loss.
Following such tests, the findings will be recorded on an audiogram, which is a visualization of your hearing ability. Based on the conclusions, as well as your lifestyle needs, we will recommend specific types of treatment.
Hearing Tests
There are various types of hearing tests. Most tests check the tones or words delivered at different pitches, volumes, and noise environments for your response. Those are called tests of sound.
Pure-Tone Test
We will send a series of tones to your headphones. During the test, we may adjust the tone pitch and loudness at different points. The tones can be barely audible at some stages. We will ask you to raise your hand whenever you hear the sounds. The test helps you identify the quietest sounds that you can hear at various pitches.
Speech-In-Noise Test
Many people with hearing loss have difficulty processing speech in busy environments. This test will demonstrate how well you can listen to conversations in noisy places. You will listen to and repeat a series of simple words spoken at various volumes, often with interfering background noise levels.
Tympanometry
This test is designed to test your eardrums. Using tuning forks, we will gauge the health of your eardrums and determine whether your eardrum and middle ear are functioning at their best.
Real Ear Measurement
We are proud to use Real Ear Measurement (also known as Live Speech Mapping) to test the hearing abilities of our patients who use hearing aids. This is a crucial procedure for people who experience hearing loss. We use Real Ear Measurement to properly fit hearing aids for our patients, a procedure performed by only a minority of hearing aid professionals in our area.
Whether you are a new hearing aid wearer or a veteran, the Real Ear Measurement test is the gold standard when it comes to hearing evaluations. In everyday life, you are surrounded at any given time by an array of sound frequencies. High-frequency sounds can include chirping birds or a doorbell. Lower frequency sounds may consist of rumbling thunder in the distance or the hum of your fridge motor.
Hearing loss occurs at different frequencies, and that's why live speech mapping is so important. It helps us decide whether additional amplification is needed for specific pitches of sound. This helps to enhance the benefits your hearing aid devices will bring.
During the Real Ear Measurement process, you will be wearing your hearing aids as you normally would. A small microphone is placed in the ear canal with the hearing aid to take an exact measurement of the frequencies being picked up while your hearing aids are turned on and functioning as they usually would. The measurements taken from this reading are then compared to the hearing prescription of the patient to see if the amplification levels of all frequencies are being accounted for.
