The BAHA® System

Types of hearing loss the BAHA® System can help

• Unilateral sensori-neural hearing loss/Single Sided Deafness– Due to examples such as:

• Acoustic neuroma tumors • Sudden deafness• Neurological degenerative disease• Trauma• Ototoxic treatments• Inner ear malformation• Genetics• Meniere’s Disease

BAHA® CandidateSingle Sided Deafness

• > 5years of age• Intended to improve speech recognition• Intended for patients with SSD (unilateral sensori-

neural hearing loss) when the other ear is normal• Normal hearing is defined as PTA AC threshold

equal to or better than 20 dB at .5, 1, 2 and 3kHz• For patients who cannot or will not use AC CROS

HA• Functions by transcranial routing of the signal

How does the BAHA® System work for SSD?

Head-shadow EffectReview

• For speech the overall reduction of effective intensity is approximately 6 dB (Tillman etal., 1963)

• Its effect on speech intelligibility is approximately a reduction of 23% when sound is coming directly from the ‘bad’ ear side

• Binaural amplification in eliminating the head shadow effect can be about 25% or 6 dB improvement Minimal effect at 1500Hz, but continues upward to approximately 15 dB at 5000 Hz (Staab 1988b)

• in the S/N ratio (from the Handbook of Clinical Audiology, Katz)

Unilateral Deafness• Handicap of unilateral deafness was

UNDERESTIMATED

• Complaints of unilateral deafness:– Difficulty understanding speech in noise– Difficulty hearing sounds presented on the deaf side– Unbalanced environment

From Wazen et al. presented at AAO-HNS Meeting, San Diego, September 2002

Initial findings

SSD Questionnaire Results from BAHA® System Wearers

• 70% wearing the BAHA® 7 days per week• 94% used the device > 8 hours per day• 70% improvement in quality of life • 88%better performance at a dinner table, when a

person sitting on their deaf side • 88%better performance while talking to one person

among a group of people. • Average satisfaction score = 8 / 10 point scale

From Wazen et al. presented at AAO-HNS Meeting, San Diego, September 2002