METHOD FOR COMBINED ELECTROACOUSTIC AND PSYCHOACOUSTIC ADJUSTMENT OF HEARING AIDS Russian patent published in 2025 - IPC A61B5/00 A61F11/04 

FIELD: medicine.

SUBSTANCE: invention refers to medicine, namely to methods for assessing the effectiveness of hearing aids, and can be used for electroacoustic and psychoacoustic verification of hearing aids. Verification is performed using electroacoustic (measurement of acoustic output of hearing aid in real ear) and psychoacoustic (assessment of subjective detection and phoneme distinction) approaches. Patient is placed in front of a loudspeaker integrated into the system at a distance of one metre. Thereafter, a hearing aid is put on the same ear with the microphone off. Response of the occluded ear is measured, then the microphone of the apparatus is switched on, and the response of the apparatus is measured in a real ear to stimuli of three intensities – 55, 65 and 75 dB SPL. After achieving an adequate tuning at the second stage, successively synthesized phonemes are supplied through the loudspeaker: [m], [u], [a], [i], [sh], [s], detection result of each phoneme is evaluated in parallel electroacoustically and psychoacoustic. Presence of auditory discomfort is then assessed. For this purpose, white noise and pure tones with frequency of 500, 1000, 2000 and 4000 Hz and intensity of 85 dB SPL are presented through a loudspeaker. If the patient experiences auditory discomfort, the OSPL90 parameter in the hearing aid settings program is reduced in the appropriate frequency range until the discomfort disappears. If the patient shows no discomfort to pure tones, but shows discomfort to white noise, then the parameter OSPL90 is reduced in the entire range until the discomfort disappears.

EFFECT: method provides higher efficiency of verifying the adjustment of hearing aids.

1 cl, 3 dwg, 2 ex