The effect of remote fitting technology on hearing aid satisfaction

Abstract

Background Telemedicine is a method of providing remote healthcare services and consultations to patients using communication technology. Tele-audiology is a sub-branch of telemedicine. It refers to providing audiology services using telehealth strategies. This study aims to compare the satisfaction of patients who come to the hearing aid center and receive device fitting service and patients who have hearing aid fitting using tele-audiology service. For this purpose, hearing aid users were divided into two groups. The study group consisted of 17 participants (10 male, 7 females; mean age 65.17 ± 13.88) who continued fitting appointments remotely after the first clinic application, while the control group consisted of 23 participants (10 males, 13 females; mean age 62.17 ± 18.32) who had all hearing aid fittings performed face-to-face in the clinic. The participant’s satisfaction was assessed with The International Outcome Inventory for Hearing Aids Turkiye (IOI-HA-TR) questionnaire because it is practical and can be administered over the phone. Results There were no significant differences in hearing aid satisfaction between those who came to the hearing center and filled out the IOI-HA-TR questionnaire personally and those who completed it through the Remote Care application (p < 0.05). In addition, most of the participants stated that using Remote Care solved their problems (35% very good, 24% good) and they were satisfied with the fitting of their hearing aids with this application (35% good, 29% very good). In addition, 13 out of 17 participants stated that they would pay attention to the “remote fitting” feature when purchasing a new hearing aid (76% very good). Moreover, they would like to continue the fitting using the Remote Care application (65% yes). Conclusion Remote fitting technology via smartphone applications can facilitate the lives of hearing aid users and improve their quality of life in cases of risky conditions such as pandemics, various diseases, and physical limitations.

Systematic review of patient and service outcome measures of remote digital technologies for cochlear implant and hearing aid users

“…The Downs and Black Checklist for Measuring Study Quality was used to investigate individual risk of bias and study quality for the included publications (Downs and Black, 1998). Ten studies were rated as good quality (Ferguson et al, 2016;Cullington et al, 2018;Gomez and Ferguson, 2020;Tao et al, 2020;Venail et al, 2021;Henshaw et al, 2022;Brewer et al, 2023;Coco et al, 2023;Maidment et al, 2023;Malmberg and Hagberg, 2023), seven as poor quality (de Graaff et al, 2016(de Graaff et al, , 2018Maidment et al, 2019;Schepers et al, 2019;Ratanjee-Vanmali et al, 2020;Carner et al, 2023;Çelikgün and Büyükkal, 2023) and the remaining 32 studies were rated as fair quality. The Downs and Black results are available in Supplementary material 4.…”