Hearing Aid Fittings for Children
Specialist hearing diagnostics, audiological evaluations, and hearing aid fittings for children.
Hearing loss can occur at any age. Hearing loss affects 2-3 out of every 1,000 children born in the United States. Hearing loss happens to many people as they age. Hearing loss can be due to the aging process alone or in combination with any of the following: exposure to loud noise, certain medications, infections, head or ear trauma, congenital (birth or prenatal) or hereditary factors, diseases, as well as a number of other causes.
Potomac Audiology offers hearing diagnostics, audiological evaluations, and hearing aid fittings for newborns, infants, and children with hearing loss, to provide them with the best hearing solution and quality of life. The audiologists at Potomac Audiology will work with you and your child to determine the most appropriate hearing aid fitting for them.
How is a hearing aid fitted and evaluated on an infant or young child?
The process of fitting hearing aids to children is different than it is for adults. While adults can tell their audiologist how well a hearing aid seems to work, if certain sounds are too loud, or if speech sounds garbled or unclear, young children have a harder time articulating this.
For this reason, it is important to find a pediatric audiologist with extensive experience in fitting hearing aids to children. Because a child’s early years are particularly important for speech and language development, finding the best hearing aids for each child is very important. Hearing aids must be fit individually for each child. No one hearing aid is appropriate for everyone.
Some important factors that a pediatric audiologist will consider when selecting hearing aids are:
- Degree and shape of the hearing loss
- Durability and service of hearing aid models
- Compatibility with special amplification systems used in schools
Real Ear measurements for the most accurate hearing aid testing in children.
The best method of testing hearing aid benefit for young children is Real Ear measurements. During this test, a small, soft microphone is placed in the child’s ear next to the earmold. This approach allows the audiologist to determine how much sound is being delivered to the child’s ear.
Because infants and young children have much smaller ear canals than adults, it is important to make these measures to avoid loudness discomfort and/or further damage to the child’s hearing.
For very young children, a special probe microphone technique called Real Ear-to-Coupler-Difference (RECD) measurement can be used. The audiologist combines this information with the response of the hearing aid measured in a test box to find the best hearing aid and hearing aid settings without having to do repeated hearing aid testing on the child. If an audiologist uses RECD measures before fitting the hearing aid directly on the child, she/he can avoid the problem of too much sound from the hearing aid or inaccurate volume settings.
The most important goal for infants and young children who wear hearing aids is making speech loud enough for the child to hear. Real Ear measures enable the audiologist to determine how much speech will be heard with different types of hearing aids.
Potomac Audiology typically recommends considering the following hearing aids for developed specifically for children.
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Oticon Opn Play™ Open up your child’s world
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Phonak Sky™ Marvel
- Robustness
- Designed with children’s active lives and safety in mind.
- Tamper-resistant battery door
- Helps keep the battery out of reach of curious fingers.
- IP68 Certified
- Ensures dust- and water-resistance, to withstand humidity and varying temperatures.
- Free of allergens
- Excludes more than 200 potentially harmful materials including phthalates. Also, painted with biocompatible paint and completely hypoallergenic.
- LED light for complete peace of mind
- Gives caregivers and teachers visual confirmation that the battery is functioning properly.
- AutoSense Sky OS is the world’s first operating system built specifically for children and provides an optimal listening experience in situations like noisy classrooms and outdoor playgrounds.
- Sky Marvel connects directly to smartphones and other Bluetooth® enabled devices, enabling children to easily enjoy speech, music, TV and much more.
- This powerful rechargeable technology offers a full day of hearing including 10 hours of Roger or media streaming.
- Tamperproof and designed to provide comfort, safety and robustness in all aspects of a child’s active life.
- AutoSense Sky OS is the world’s first operating system built specifically for children and provides an optimal listening experience in situations like noisy classrooms and outdoor playgrounds.
- Sky Marvel connects directly to smartphones and other Bluetooth® enabled devices, enabling children to easily enjoy speech, music, TV and much more.
- This powerful rechargeable technology offers a full day of hearing including 10 hours of Roger or media streaming.
- Tamperproof and designed to provide comfort, safety and robustness in all aspects of a child’s active life.
Oticon Opn Play™ Open up your child’s world
Oticon Opn Play helps your child be just that– a child
As a parent, you probably have a lot of questions: How will your child cope at day care or school? Will he or she make friends? What about the future? With Oticon Opn Play, there’s finally a cutting-edge hearing aid that allows your child to learn, grow, play, and thrive. Open up their world, let them play, laugh along with friends, let them dream about the future. Just like any other child.
Open up to a breakthrough in pediatric hearing care.
Oticon Opn Play gives your child 360º access to the world and helps your child differentiate between meaningful sound and irrelevant, disturbing sound. Our OpenSound Navigator™ technology improves speech understanding in noisy environments and supports incidental learning by giving your child access to multiple speakers in the environment.
From traditional technology to revolutionary open sound.
Before Oticon Opn Play, traditional omni directional technology could overload your child with access to all sounds and noise, whether relevant or not. Or, they could be fitted with traditional directional technology which closes down sounds and restricts the opportunity to learn.
Oticon Opn Play marks the change from listening to the world to truly making sense of the world. This groundbreaking innovation lets your child enjoy a full, balanced soundscape.
Give your child better opportunities to learn Open up your child’s world.
Compared with children with normal hearing, children with hearing loss experience more difficulty in perceiving speech and developing language skills in noise.
Opn Play offers a broad range of classroom connectivity options to support learning, including providing clear access to audio sound and a teacher’s voice using Oticon EduMic.
You and your child can choose among four different styles, each suited for hearing losses from mild to severe: the traditional BTE PP style; the small and discreet miniRITE or miniRITE T (telecoil) styles; and the new miniRITE R, a state-of-the-art rechargeable lithium-ion instrument in a discreet design.
Opn Play comes in a range of 12 colors to discreetly complement hair and skin or to be bright and colorful. A fun collection of decorative stickers are also available so your child can add their own personality to the hearing aids.
Designed to stand up to the test of childhood
Phonak Sky™ Marvel
Combining world’s first technological innovations and child-specific designs to support children of all ages.
The key to children’s development
Close relationships are essential for children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development. Sky Marvel enables children to build strong bonds by offering clear rich sound and access to more words and conversations every day.
Clear, rich sound
Connects to smartphones, Roger mics and more
Rechargeable
Child-specific design
Mix & Match Colors
Sky Marvel is available in a variety of colors ranging from fun and vibrant to discreet skin-tone shades. Children can choose a combination of colors that truly matches their personality, giving them confidence to embrace and enjoy wearing their hearing aids.
The right solution for every situation.
The Phonak Sky Marvel comes in two models reflecting your child’s degree of hearing loss. A hearing care professional will advise you on the right model and performance
The key to children’s development
Close relationships are essential for children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development. Sky Marvel enables children to build strong bonds by offering clear rich sound and access to more words and conversations every day.
Clear, rich sound
Connects to smartphones, Roger mics and more
Rechargeable
Child-specific design
Mix & Match Colors
Sky Marvel is available in a variety of colors ranging from fun and vibrant to discreet skin-tone shades. Children can choose a combination of colors that truly matches their personality, giving them confidence to embrace and enjoy wearing their hearing aids.
The right solution for every situation.
The Phonak Sky Marvel comes in two models reflecting your child’s degree of hearing loss. A hearing care professional will advise you on the right model and performance
