Pediatric Free Field

For adults, audiometric evaluation is relatively easy because the majority accepts hearing a headphone and is able to respond correctly if a sound is audible. Also evaluation of the hearing instrument benefit can be done by using speech material presented by loudspeakers.

For children, especially very young ones, audiometric and hearing instrument benefit evaluation is much more demanding.

Some children do not accept that a headphone is put on their head or insert earphones are inserted in their ear. The only way to conduct an audiometric evaluation is to present sounds by means of loudspeakers. In order to achieve correct results the test environment must be calibrated prior to the actual test.

Another difficult is to make the child respond to a sound which is audible to him. This can be achieved by connecting sounds with visual signals such as funny or colourful pictures which the children are interested to look at. This is achieved by connecting sounds with visual signals like funny, colorful pictures what children are interested to look at. The procedure is called "Visual Reinforcement Audiometry (VRA)". Every time a sound is presented; it will be followed by a picture a few seconds later. After a couple of times the child realizes "If there is a sound, it will be followed by a picture". In actual fact, the child is more interested in the picture than the sound. An audible sound makes the child look for the picture and thus every search reaction following a sound, suggests that the previous sound was audible.

For hearing instrument benefit evaluation, VRA is done twice. Once without hearing instrument and when hearing instrument is worn.

VRA is part of a whole test package for children, which also includes also Tympanometry, OAE and ABR.