The Effectiveness of the Directional Microphone in the Oticon Medical Ponto Pro in Participants with Unilateral Sensorineural Hearing Loss

Abstract

Background: Current bone anchored hearing solutions (BAHSs) have incorporated automatic adaptive multichannel directional microphones (DMs). Previous fixed single-channel hypercardioid DMs in BAHSs have provided benefit in a diffuse listening environment, but little data are available on the performance of adaptive multichannel DMs in BAHSs for persons with unilateral sensorineural hearing loss (USNHL).

Ten years of experience with the Ponto bone‐anchored hearing system—A systematic literature review

“…[12][13][14][15] Comparisons to other brands of sound processors were performed with a within-subject crossover design in four studies [16][17][18][19] and between groups in two studies. 20,21 Comparison to other treatment options was performed for SSD patients and contralateral routing of signals devices with a within-subject design. 22 A single study reported the difference between patients with softband and a subset of patients with implanted devices.…”

“…12 the ability to perform lexical decision tasks, the ability to detect nonsense words in context, rapid word learning,27 memory recall by the sentence-final Word Identification and Recall Test (SWIR) test,28 the Abbreviated Profile of Hearing Aid Benefit[13][14][15][16][17]21,26 and the Speech Spatial and Qualities of Hearing scale [13][14][15][16][17]22. …”

Clinical outcomes with the Kanso™ off-the-ear cochlear implant sound processor

“…To offset potential negative impacts on speech understanding, early bone conduction sound processors quickly implemented dual-microphone technologies capable of attenuating sounds from the rear and side of listeners while retaining sounds from the front (Flynn et al, 2011). Dual-microphone studies with bone-anchored devices have shown significant speech understanding improvements compared to a single-microphone processor (Flynn et al, 2011;Kompis et al, 2007;Oeding et al, 2010), but not in all cases (Oeding & Valente, 2013). Comparing omni-directional microphones to directional microphones, Kompis et al (2007) reported a 1.9 dB improvement testing with speech from the front and noise from the rear for participants with bilateral hearing loss.…”

Sentence Recognition in Noise and Perceived Benefit of Noise Reduction on the Receiver and Transmitter Sides of a BICROS Hearing Aid

“…Another reason for perceived improvement could be the participant's ability to control the volume independently on the receiver and transmitter sides, allowing the user to decrease unwanted noise from the transmitter side, which was mentioned by several participants While it is possible to conclude that the lack of agreement between the objective measure (i.e., no improvement in performance for the BICROS with NR on or off) and the subjective measure (preference, as measured by the APHAB) is exclusively related to the Hawthorne or placebo effect (Bentler et al, 2003;Dawes et al, 2011), an alternative explanation might help explain this seemingly contradictory finding. The lack of agreement between objective and subjective measures has a long history when investigating hearing aid performance (Valente et al, 1998;Cord et al, 2000;Hallgren et al, 2005;Ricketts and Hornsby, 2005;Oeding and Valente, 2013). Consider for this study, for which the participant wore the experimental hearing aid for 4 wk and the objective measures were completed in approximately 1 hr, the average result revealed no significant differences in noise between NR on or off.…”