At Hearing Sense, we don’t actually like to call what we do a ‘Hearing Test’, as it is more of a Hearing Experience. We go above and beyond to ensure that not only are you assessed in a professional and thorough assessment, but that we also can provide information about your hearing that is specific to you and your life.
We think that the conventional free ‘Screening test’ is not a proper assessment, and that is why we provide a comprehensive one hour Hearing Experience at no charge to you.
We like to have a conversation about your general health, your ears and hearing troubles. The reason why we do this is to find out aspects of your history that may tie in with causes for any hearing problem, such as noise exposure or medicines that could have affected your hearing.
Also, we like to find out about your general health which can help us in your hearing aid options such as, whether you have arthritis which may make using a very small battery difficult and we need to look at a rechargeable battery or bigger battery choice.
We look inside the ear canal using an instrument called an otoscope. We can view the ear canal to check if it is healthy, check for any wax blockages and also look at your eardrum health.
This tests the middle ear by blowing a small puff of air into the earcanal. This can tell us if the eardrum and middle ear bones are working well and moving normally or not. We can also use it to check for ear infections and if you have Eustachian Tube troubles.
Using insert earphones, we play a series of different pitch sounds and ask you to push a button for every sound you can hear. What we are testing here is the softest sound you can hear at each and every frequency that is important to speech understanding. This is called Air Conduction testing.
We then use a Bone Conductor to also check your hearing. This test allows us to determine what part of the ear is affected and causing hearing loss. See Hearing Loss types
We plot the results on a graph of hearing called audiogram which shows a normal hearing range and then varying levels of loss for each pitch of sound.
We use a list of words to test the consonants that you are missing and which you are able to hear well. This is a very good indicator of how well your ear and brain is processing speech. This can also help us determine whether a hearing aid may be of benefit.
Most people have trouble hearing speech in background noise, yet this is rarely tested in a clinic. We test your hearing ability to comprehend sentences in background noise (like at a party). This can give us an indication of how well your brain is processing the message it receives from the ears.
Once we have all the results, we look at your hearing health as a whole picture in combination with the real life experiences you have told us about in our initial conversation.
For example, if you have mentioned having trouble hearing TV clearly even though the volume is up, we would look at the slope of your loss to see which pitches of sound are most affected. We would also look at the speech test results and bone conduction results to show us where in the ear the damage is, and why this is specifically affecting your ability to hear TV clearly.
We explain all the results thoroughly using demonstrations and displays on a mounted TV screen.
We then look at possible solutions to help you hear better.
This entire expert consultation is completely FREE. Because we believe the only way to treat you, our patient, is with the best of hearing care and professional testing. This will allow you to feel secure in the test results and any solutions that may be recommended.
