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Table of Contents
BILATERAL HEARING VS UNILATERAL HEARING.
BILATERAL COCHLEAR IMPLANTATION.
INTRODUCTION
In the view of Byrne (1981), the advancement in technology, innovative and new ideas has demonstrated success in the area of providing optimal hearing to the patients that have severe hearing issues. The increasing advancement in technology and machinery has further shown success in the area of cochlear implantation and has further provided optimal hearing to the patients who have hearing issues.
New implantation techniques have demonstrated success for patients that have extreme hearing issues. They have provided patients with better speech recognition skill and also have many other benefits [1]
The technology that is being used for implantation has developed hysterically over the period of last 40 years. With this dramatic improvement, there is an increased demand for safety and efficiency of the technology. Earlier, the patients with bilateral hearing issues were provided one cochlear implant, but now from past few years, the patients with bilateral implant have increased. Obviously, there are clear benefits of bilateral (two ears) hearing and all these benefits are documented in the upcoming sections of the essay (Silman et al., 1984).
There are several patients of single ear implantation that are having hearing issues in the other ear. It is important that binaural hearing is provided to these patients. This issue can be addressed by either providing these patients with bilateral implantation (that is cochlear implantation in both ears) or bimodal fittings (that is a cochlear implantation in one ear and a hearing aid in the second one). Bilateral implantation and bimodal fittings both are discussed in detail in the upcoming section of this paper.
The aim of this particular paper is to answer the question that “bimodal fittings can have an advantage over just a cochlear implant and over bilateral implants”.
I particularly intend to answer this question by providing different researches and studies in this area. Different studies and researches will be explained and analyzed in order to evaluate the answer and to draw a suitable conclusion.
BILATERAL HEARING VS UNILATERAL HEARING
Bimodal fittings: The superiority of binaural hearing (that is hearing with two ears) is far more beneficial as compared to hearing with a single ear in normal human beings. Binaural hearing is beneficial for patients because it provides a better understanding of speech and locating sound compared to monaural hearing (Byrne ,1981). Moreover, the aural stimulation of both ears stops neural degeneration which in turns prevent aural deprivation (Silman et al., 1984).
Bimodal fittings: It is widely known that bilateral or binaural hearing is much more beneficial than monaural hearing or unilateral hearing. It is the fundamental characteristic of a normal auditory system. In daily life, conversations usually take place in rooms and locations where there are surrounding noises available too. In cases, where there is more than one speaker, interpretation of speeches is complex. There is evidence showing the benefits when there is stimulation of two ears (that is bilateral hearing) compared to stimulation of one ear (that is unilateral hearing) are quietly visible in normal listeners (Silman et al., 1984).
Bimodal fittings: When individual listens to monaural tunes compared to binaural tunes at higher threshold levels, the stimulus during monaural hearing should be about 9 to 10 decibel greater than the one during a bilateral hearing in order to achieve equal loudness. This effects of binaural loudness summation help the signal getting loud when the individual is listening with two ears than with a single ear. Binaural signal provides an increased sensitivity to smaller changes which results in improvement in speech perception (Bronkhorst and Plomp, 1988)…
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