Factors Influencing Communication with Hearing Impairment in Old Age

The main goal of this doctoral thesis was to measure differences in speech intelligibility between older and younger hearing-impaired people and to establish the factors influencing the effectiveness of the use of hearing aids in the elderly. We focused on three related areas: 1/ To measure how the magnitude of difference of hearing and speech intelligibility in silence differs between younger and older populations, with a similar degree of hearing loss, in terms of word audiometry. 2/ To establish how speech intelligibility in competitive noise differs between younger and older populations with a similar degree of auditory defect, in terms of the Czech Test of Sentence Intelligibility in Babble Noise. 3/ To establish which factors affect the effectiveness of hearing aids for seniors, the motivation for the acquisition and regular use of hearing aids, and whether these factors correlate with age or lifestyle. Methodology 1/ A group of 143 hearing aid users was divided into young (N = 60, mean age 15,9 y.) and seniors (N = 83, mean age 83,6 y.). For these two age groups we compared the differences between SRT values (understanding in word audiometry in silence, in the free field) and PTA values (hearing threshold in pure tone audiometry). 2/ A group of 423 persons, examined using the Test of..