Welcome back to the All About Audiology Podcast, season 2!

I’m your host, Dr. Lilach Saperstein and I’m very excited that you’re back for more. Season 2 is going to be full of lots of exciting topics and we are starting off the season with an episode on BAHA (Bone Anchored Hearing Aids). If you have never heard of this term, then you will learn in this episode what a BAHA is, who a BAHA is for, and a bit about the process of getting and using a BAHA. I’ll also be including an incredible interview with a woman that I really admire. Her name is Abbi Perets. She is a mom of five, and one of her sons has a BAHA. We are going to talk a little bit about the journey and the experience that she had from her perspective as the mother. I think many of you resonate with that.

I know we have many listeners to the podcast who are students of audiology or speech pathology. I love connecting with students who are so enthusiastic and so inspired to learn. For the two major groups of listeners who are parents of children on their hearing journey and professionals who are eager to learn and work with you: there’s an amazing amount of dialogue going on at the All About Audiology Facebook group. So please come over and join us for extended discussions. That’s what I love about the podcast, it’s not just me talking to you guys, it’s all of us talking to each other and learning together.

So let’s get started with BAHA.

What’s the difference between a regular hearing aid, a traditional acoustic hearing aid, and the BAHA hearing aid?

Well, the acoustic hearing aid, is the regular hearing aid that you see, the BTE, with a mold in the ear and the hearing aid sitting at the top of the ear. That hearing aid is taking in sounds from the environment with a microphone, processing them in the small computer chip that is programmed in the hearing aid, programmed specifically for their hearing loss. And then the output, what’s sent out of the hearing aid, is also acoustic, which means it’s also sound waves, they are amplified and they are processed in a way that’s going to help a person with a hearing loss but it is the same. Acoustic input, acoustic output, sound waves come in, sound waves come out.

Whereas with the BAHA (Bone Anchored Hearing Aids), the input is the same, the input is acoustic waves, sound waves in the environment. Sounds in our environment are going into the microphone and it gets processed in the same kind of programming that goes into programming a hearing aid. How much gain, how much louder should things be made for the person’s hearing loss, but the output is not sent as sound waves, it’s sent as vibrations that are going directly to the cochlea, by way of the skull. Within the skull is the bones of the cochlea, containing the cochlea, that’s how the sounds are able to stimulate the cochlea directly, skipping the outer ear, skipping the middle ear and if there’s a conductive hearing loss where the problem is in the outer or middle ear, then a BAHA might be an option.

If you remember from Episode 5, we talked about the different kinds of hearing loss, and one of the kinds of hearing loss that can be is a conductive hearing loss and this can be microtia or anotia, where the outer ear isn’t formed or open in the typical way. It might be any kind of chronic middle ear infections, or any issue with the little bones in the ears.