Can You Use a Hearing Aid with a Cochlear Implant?
Cochlear implants are a fairly newer technology that is being offered to patients with profound hearing loss. Implants can be installed in one ear or both ears depending on the specific circumstances of the patient. Sometimes due to insurance restrictions or financial constraints, a person may only have a unilateral cochlear implant installed.
What Is A Cochlear Implant?
A cochlear implant is a small electronic device that is implanted into the ear. This helps people with severe and profound deafness hear sounds. While this type of implant isn't designed to completely restore a person's hearing, it can help to partially restore severe hearing loss.
In an event where a person only suffers severe hearing loss in one ear and mild hearing loss in the other, they may be prescribed a combination of a cochlear implant and hearing aid. Hearing aids are great devices to pair with cochlear implants to assist a person in hearing better.
In fact, various studies have been performed to determine whether or not hearing aids and Cochlear implants combined can help a person hear better. For example, studies revealed that single word recognition improved by 15 to 20 percent when a hearing aid was used alongside the cochlear implant. In addition, sentence recognition when there was background noise was improved by between 20 to 30 percent in patients given a hearing aid.
How Can Hearing Aids Help?
Apart from enhancing a person's ability to understand sentences and words, hearing aids also provide a more balanced feel. Using a hearing aid alongside a cochlear implant, a person can use both of their ears for hearing, which makes them feel more balanced than just using one ear alone. In addition, people hearing in both ears can better determine the location of where sounds are coming from as they can better judge the arrival time of the sound to each ear.
Many people who have cochlear implants installed unilaterally complain of speech or music that doesn't sound natural. When a hearing aid is introduced into the non-implant ear, these patients can have better sound quality as the combination is more efficient at portraying fine-grain spectral and pitching information. As a result, these patients notate fuller sounds, richer and more natural than just with the implant alone.
Call Us Today
If you've recently had a cochlear implant installed in one of your ears, you may be slightly disappointed at the results. However, the reality is that having a hearing aid in your non-implant ear will help to create better quality sounds and make you feel more balanced. Simply give us a call at Beltone Skoric Hearing Aid Center and let our hearing care specialists work with you to find the right hearing aid to fit your needs.
