Case Study
Use of hearing aids to improve acoustic perception

The company is a supermarket chain.

The woman is deaf in her left ear and hard of hearing in her right ear with additional tinnitus (ringing in the ears), although her right ear is fitted with a hearing aid to improve her hearing. Verbal communication with her via spoken language is therefore only possible to a limited extent - especially with strong background noise and conversations from the left. The degree of disability (GdB) is 70.

The employee is an industrial clerk and works 20 hours a week as a cashier on a part-time basis in a branch of the supermarket chain.

The checkout area of the supermarket consists of several scanner checkouts at which the cashier and her colleagues work. Their main tasks include:

• recording the prices by swiping the goods over the scanner,
• receiving the money for the goods or alternatively preparing the card payment device for the customers,
• returning the change,
• handing out the receipt and
• talking to customers with questions, complaints, etc.

The work is carried out continuously and quickly - to make this possible, there must also be good communication with the customers.

With her hearing aid, the cashier finds noise from the movement of goods, shopping carts and customers particularly disruptive when carrying out her work. The noise situation also makes it very difficult to have the necessary clarifying conversations with customers or colleagues.
Tests and measurements have shown that a modern digital hearing aid with directional microphone, noise suppression, bicro-supply and tinnitus masking can eliminate the workplace-related hearing problems with appropriate adaptations or programming by a specialist hearing aid acoustics store. The modern hearing aid adjusts to the speech source or the customer at the checkout and determines the respective sound situation. As a result, it amplifies the required frequencies, taking into account the necessary sound pressure level (volume) - while at the same time reducing background noise. If the cashier is spoken to on the left side of her deaf ear, a BiCROS fitting enables her to hear the conversation acoustically via the hearing aid with her right ear. With a BiCROS fitting, a microphone is attached to the deaf ear and the acoustic signals are transmitted by radio to the receiver of the hearing aid on the right ear so that the cashier can react appropriately and hear speech and useful sound even when spoken to from the left.

The hearing aid was subsidized with a fixed amount by the health insurance company. The remaining amount or the additional requirement was covered by the pension insurance fund on application, as the cashier absolutely needed this provision of assistive products for her gainful employment as a cashier due to her disability. The advice, measurements and adjustments were carried out by a specialist hearing aid acoustics store.