By Jennifer Groth, M.A.
One of the best ways to personalize a fitting for your patients is to choose the most appropriate hearing aid experience level. ReSound’s Aventa 3 fitting software includes 4 levels specific to the patient’s hearing aid experience level: Comfort User, First Time User, Experience – Linear, and Experience – Nonlinear. This feature allows the clinician to choose the most appropriate experience level for the initial fitting and to change the target and gain settings based on accumulated experience over time.
Personalizing the hearing aid fitting to the patient’s experience level is likely to have a direct impact on user satisfaction. Research shows that among common complaints from new hearing aid users is that sounds can be too loud. A good way to avoid this complaint is to set the patient at the “Comfort User” or “First Time User” experience level. As patients get used to wearing their hearing aid, they may be able to tolerate higher levels of amplification. At this point, you can change the setting to “Experience – Nonlinear”. It’s a good idea to change settings as patients become more accustomed to amplified sound, as higher gain levels can help the patient achieve optimal speech intelligibility.
The Experience – Linear setting, which assigns the greatest levels of gain, should only be chosen for experienced hearing aid users, who are more likely to be acclimated to louder gain levels.