We all lead busy lives, which often means things like regular hearing tests get pushed back on the to-do list. However, there are hearing test benefits Adelaide that make it an essential part of your health routine.
The most commonly used hearing test is pure tone audiometry. It involves sitting in a sound-treated booth and listening to tones of different volumes and pitches that are played into one ear.
Air conduction
Air conduction testing uses a soundproof room to hear different pitches and loudness. The sounds are played into your ears through a set of headphones. Your audiologist will ask you to indicate when you can hear the sound and what kind of sound it is. They will then use this information to make a chart called an audiogram that pinpoints the severity and possible cause of your hearing loss.
If you can hear the tune longer when it is struck on the mastoid but not when it is touched on your ear, you have sensorineural hearing loss. It is usually caused by damage to the inner ear or auditory nerve. It can also be caused by an ear infection or a hole in the eardrum.
Bone conduction
Most people hear through air conduction when sound waves vibrate the ear canal and reach the inner ear to be interpreted by the brain. Some people may have hearing loss in just one ear due to chronic ear infections, blocked ear canals or other conditions. For those people who can’t hear through their ears, a bone conduction device can send sound directly to the inner ear, bypassing damaged or obstructed parts of the outer or middle ear.
Bone conduction is also the basis for some of the oldest and simplest hearing test benefits Adelaide in the otolaryngologist’s repertoire, using tuning forks to distinguish between conductive impairment of the middle ear and sensorineural impairment of the inner ear and cochlear nerve, for which surgery is usually not indicated. This type of testing is also often done on infants and young children to establish a baseline for future hearing evaluations, especially as they age.
Otoacoustic emissions
Otoacoustic emissions (OAE) are noises that can be detected by a special probe placed into the ear. The probe has a speaker to deliver sounds and a microphone to record the otoacoustic emissions. OAE testing is a noninvasive test that helps your Aurora Health Care audiologist measure the function of your inner ear and the cochlear hair cells. The test is quick and painless, and it is commonly used in newborn hearing screening.
There are two types of otoacoustic emissions: spontaneous and evoked. Spontaneous OAEs occur in the ear spontaneously, without stimulation, and only occur in about 40-50 percent of normal ears. Evoked OAEs are produced in response to a stimulus that is short, typically clicks or tone bursts. The most common OAE tests in screening and diagnostic audiology are distortion product Otoacoustic emissions (DPOAE) and transient evoked Otoacoustic emissions (TEOAE).
Speech discrimination
Speech discrimination is a key component of the hearing test. It measures how well a person hears individual sounds in noisy environments. This information can be used to identify hearing loss, determine its severity and provide an indication of the impact it will have on everyday life activities. It can also indicate whether a patient needs assistive devices such as phones, doorbells or alarms.
A common method of testing speech discrimination is pure tone audiometry. It consists of presenting a series of tones, one at a time, through earphones. These tones are presented in a range of frequencies (Hz), from low-bass tones to high-pitched tones. A patient’s pure-tone thresholds can then be compared to a normal population to measure their hearing ability.
These hearing test benefits Adelaide may not always be accurate, however. They can be influenced by a variety of factors, such as age and the patient’s familiarity with the noises being tested. The test results can vary significantly depending on these factors, so it is important to take this into account when interpreting the findings of an audiogram.