Effect of a Bluetooth-Implemented Hearing Aid on Speech Recognition Performance

Abstract

The object was to evaluate speech perception improvement through Bluetooth-implemented hearing aids in hearing-impaired adults. Thirty subjects with bilateral symmetric moderate sensorineural hearing loss participated in this study. A Bluetooth-implemented hearing aid was fitted unilaterally in all study subjects. Objective speech recognition score and subjective satisfaction were measured with a Bluetooth-implemented hearing aid to replace the acoustic connection from either a cellular phone or a loudspeaker system. In each system, participants were assigned to 4 conditions: wireless speech signal transmission into hearing aid (wireless mode) in quiet or noisy environment and conventional speech signal transmission using external microphone of hearing aid (conventional mode) in quiet or noisy environment. Also, participants completed questionnaires to investigate subjective satisfaction. Both cellular phone and loudspeaker system situation, participants showed improvements in sentence and word recognition scores with wireless mode compared to conventional mode in both quiet and noise conditions (P < .001). Participants also reported subjective improvements, including better sound quality, less noise interference, and better accuracy naturalness, when using the wireless mode (P < .001). Bluetooth-implemented hearing aids helped to improve subjective and objective speech recognition performances in quiet and noisy environments during the use of electronic audio devices.