Analyzing Sound Quality of Advanced Bone Anchored Hearing Aids

Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission In this study we explored whether differences in sound quality existed between new advanced Bone Anchored Hearing Aids (BAHA). Three groups of subjects were tested. Two groups, those with normal hearing and those with sufficient residual cochlear hearing, were tested with Oticon’s Ponto Pro to Cochlear’s BP100. The third group had either mixed hearing loss or single-sided deafness and they compared the more powerful devices (Oticon’s Ponto Pro Power and Cochlear’s BP110). Some differences emerged within the normal hearing listeners and the power user’s. However, no significant differences in sound quality were revealed in the non-power users of the Ponto Pro and BP100. These limited results most likely reflect a lack of power in the data due to the limited number of subjects per group. Continued data collection is warranted