Choosing the Best Hearing Aid For You: CogniMatch by Value Hearing

In this video, audiologist Louai, discusses Value Hearing's unique method of prescribing hearing aids to ensure that people aren't over-prescribed or under-prescribed. Using their unique CogniMatch system, which is based on using your individual speech in noise score, your audiologist at Value Hearing is able to match the best hearing aid technology to suit your individual hearing loss and hearing needs.
For information on the importance of speech in noise testing, test your own ability to hear speech in noise and more, please visit: www.valuehearing.com.au

[@curtlizzi3167]

I like the concept but it seems while you have user data, you don’t have HA data? Do you rate each HA, and each cost level for effectiveness in background noise environments? My personal experience is that no HA works well in loud environments. One method I use is setting up a specific program to deal with these situations but it’s a blunt instrument. It’s the single greatest deficiency of HAs. While HA engines have gotten incredibly powerful they still can’t deal with this issue well. This is a real problem because HA users become more isolated because they don’t want to be in these social situations.

[@ValueHearing]

Hi @curtlizzi3167. Yes, we have specific data on each hearing aid. To keep this as simple as possible, we look at the directivity (omnidirectional, fixed directional, adaptive directional, beamforming etc) and use the information from white papers etc to rate each hearing aid specifically. When it comes to the suitability guage, we look at an individual's speech in noise score, an individual 's speech discrimination, whether it's a monaural or binaural fitting and our CogniMatch guage is a general idea of how suitable a specific hearing aid is for someone once it's fit optimally. I agree, that when it comes to hearing in noise, there are a lot of variables. What we haven't discussed in this video is that we'll also build on an individual's specific hearing goals to look at how a particular hearing aid can realisitically support someone in specific environment (we take into account the noise levels, access to visual cues, number of conversation partners, adaptation level, acoustic coupling). We use data provided by the National Acoustics Laboratory (NAL) and base it on a NAL fitting prescription.