This patient is a 75 year old man who has a bilateral symmetrical mild to moderately severe sensorineural hearing loss above 500 Hz with good word recognition scores in each ear. The patient expressed difficulty talking to his wife in the car and from distance at home. He reported they do not go out often, but when they do, it is typically just a group of three or four people. He is retired and works with his wife in her own business at home, making handmade wooden crafts. He is not concerned about cosmetics and prefers a hearing aid that sits behind his ear like the ones his neighbor has. Given the degree and configuration of his hearing loss, I would recommend a receiver in the canal hearing aid with an open dome, particularly Starkey Muse Micro RIC-312 with a …show more content…
This occlusion effect can be resolved by fitting the patient with an open dome (Winkler, Latzel, & Holube, 2016). I selected an open dome for this patient based on the recommendation of Kuk and Keenan (2006) of using an open-fit hearing aid for patients with a 20 dB HL or better hearing threshold at the low frequencies. Careful consideration should be taken for low frequency gain provided by the software or fitting formula as recommended by Winkler et al. (2016). Another reason I selected this hearing aid is that the patient can benefit from the natural/direct low frequency sound quality, which may result in a possible improvement of localization (Winkler et al.,