I've been fitting hearing aids on people for 30 years. The technological advances in the fidelity of the sound produced by hearing aids has improved significantly over the years. It has a broader bandwidth, less distortion. |
Jen and I went through tons and tons of literature on learning theory to see how do people learn. And we know that you need repetition. You need to get feedback in terms of 'Am I doing this right or wrong?' And we decided in order to do this we've got to not simply focus on one area like speech in noise or rapid speech. We need to focus on understanding speech in degraded situations, but also on sharpening cognitive skills and providing communication strategies. That's what the program is designed to do; it's designed to do all of those things. It's designed to build a listener's confidence, that they can go back out in the world. You don't have to have perfect hearing. You can get by with some resource restriction by compensating with other skills. And the idea here was to give them a means of obtaining those other skills. |
Think about what happens when you have your leg amputated and you get a prosthetic limb. They don't say 'OK, you've got your limb, hop on out of here and you're done.' They say you've got to have physical therapy. But in our field, nobody provides any kind of therapy after. |