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Our educated, experienced staff is dedicated to providing you with the highest quality of hearing care in a personalized, caring environment.
Comprehensive
Your Comprehensive Hearing Evaluation at Cole Audiology Lab Consists of Three Key Parts:
There may need to be some further testing, depending on your results. After the evaluation, the audiologist will discuss your results with you and provide you with her recommendations. You will be given a detailed report to take home as well. Here is a quick description of the tests we will conduct:
Acoustic reflex testing will measure the contraction of a small muscle that is located in your middle ear and how it responds to loud noises. Information will be gathered to help locate where the problem is by indicating what level of loudness was necessary to get a response, or if there was an absence of a response. The results of this test will be evaluated as a part of your complete hearing evaluation.
Tympanometry is a test that is able to evaluate the eardrum and the middle ear cavity. In this test, air pressure will be applied to your eardrum and there will be a measure of how well it is able to move back and forth from a resting position. Important information can be gathered about the middle ear from this test, such as if fluid is behind the ear drum, it will be unable to move when pressure is applied.
The test also lets us now if the eardrum is too mobile or too stuff and it will measure how much space is in the ear canal. The results of this test will be evaluated as a part of all of your hearing evaluation.
Otoacoustic emissions (OAE’s) are sounds that are generated from within your cochlea (inner ear), when it is stimulated by a sound. OAE testing involves inserting a small probe into the ear canal and emitting a soft tone to see if an emission is present. If so, there is a good chance that the hearing is normal or near normal at that frequency. If a patient has hearing loss, it is most likely that an otoacoustic emission will be absent or present but abnormal.
This test has significant value when assessing patients who have been exposed to noise, ototoxic drugs, suffer from tinnitus, or are infants who cannot respond to subjective tests.
Pure tone audiometry tests your perception of sound at different frequencies. We are interested to find out the softest you can hear in a frequency range from 250 to 8000 Hz. This is the speech frequency range. When this test is completed in each ear, sentences are presented to test your ability to discriminate speech at soft levels and at levels where it’s expected your understanding will be at its maximum potential, 100%.
The results of this test should correlate with the results of your pure tone test; however, in some disorders they don’t. It helps us to understand more the reasons for your complaints and struggles. These results are also evaluated together with the other tests results in order to formulate a diagnosis.
The Quick Speech-in-Noise (QuickSIN) test can quickly measure how well someone can hear when there is background noise. This test has been added to help get a better understanding of how well a patient can understand speech when there is noise.
Our educated, experienced staff is dedicated to providing you with the highest quality of hearing care in a personalized, caring environment.