Audiological effect of acoustic change due to the mold application of thin tube and standart #13 sound tube that are used in behind the ear heraing aids

Hearing instruments are known as devices that target to organize adaptation with environment by increasing the hearing level. It is essential to deliver the sound that is increased by hearing aid in a high quality and natural way and not to disturb individual. A lot of individual with hearing loss hesitate to use a hearing aid due to its appearance Hearing aid firms produce hearing aids in different models and types to make the cosmetic structere of hearing aids more desirable. Those innovations of firms provided smaller behind the ear earing aids and thiner and more cosmetic appearance of sound connection equipments to deliver the sound into the ear. So that appearance of ering aids have been reduced and prefered more by users .What are the acoustical differences of these innovations provided by producers? Aim of our study is to examine whether acoustic change of standard #13 (1, 93 mm inner diameter) hoses and thin (0,8 mm inner diameter) sound hoses due to mold application create an audiological differance or not. Examine group consists of 22 ,14 (%63.6) males and 8 (%36,4) females, individuals with hearing loss and hearing aids. Age range of participants were defined between 25 and 78 ages and average age was measured as 66 . Aid use time of these patients were measured as 25 months, approximately. Assignments of hearing aids were carried out by confirming probe tube measurements, being on the basis of Real Ear Unaided Gain-(REUG) ve Real Insertion Gain-(REIG) target curves and using National Acoustics Laboratory-Non Lineer- (NAL-NL1) method, separately for both sound hoses. In analysis, standart #13 tube aid had better performance in the measurements of 2000 HZ, 4000 HZ, 6000 HZ compared to theaid with thin tube.Only frequency level that thin tube succeeded better performance is 500 HZ. Speech discrimination percentages of patients were compared both in silence and in noise. Analysis results showed that aid with standart #13 tube had statistically better performances in both silence and noise compared to the thin tube, (p<0,05). However there is no statictically significant differance in speech detection scores of each tubes. (p>0.05). Finally, in the comparision of standart #13 tube with 1,93 mm inner diameter and thin tube with 0,8 mm inner diameter that are used to deliver sound in hearing aid, standart #13 tube has a statistically significant differance speech in noise discrimination scores.