It has always been attempted that systems connected to the ear through hearing aids efficiently meet the patient expectations. It is recommended to avoid using occluded earmolds when the hearing is normal or there is mild hearing loss. In order that natural sound  reaches to the ear, the ear canal should stay open as much as possible.To achieve the above goal and the suitable acoustic modifications, non-occluding ear molds are beneficial.

Prescription of hearing aid is an extensive special category of knowledge in the field of audiology. This article is aimed at discussing the function of hearing aid and also management of patients in the noisy environments and presenting solutions to overcome problems regarding to this issue along with taking a look to the equipments prepared nowadays to cope with noisy situations.

Binaural hearing is an important phenomenon in hearing for human being. Nowadays, the role of binaural hearing in the process of amplification has been focused. Since hearing aids act separately in the process of amplification and hearing, the attentions has been devoted to designing a system for binaural amplification by means of Beam forming which will be explained in more details in the current article.

In order to develop oral communication, hearing impaired infants and young children must be able to hear speech comfortably and consistently. To day children with all degrees of hearing loss may be condidates for some kinds of amlification.As children differ from adults, many Factors should be consider in hearing aid selection, evaluation and fitting. For example the child age when he or she is candidate for custom instruments? Do we consider programmable Hearing aid? Are multi memory instruments appropriate for them? What about directional microphones? What style of hearing aid do we select? In this paper such questions are responded.

Background and Aims: As the hearing aid technology progressively promotes toward replacing analog hearing aids with digital and programmable ones, comparison of the patient satisfaction of those kinds of hearing aids by means of a valuable tool seems so necessary. So, the aim of this study was to compare self-reported benefit of analog, digitally controlled programmable and digital hearing aids for reducing disability caused by hearing impairment in mild to severe sensorineural hearing impaired persons.
Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional study was performed on 90 persons with mild to severe sensorineural hearing loss dividing into three groups: 43 subjects were fitted with digital, 15 with programmable, 23 with analog hearing aids. After pure tone audiometry, Abbreviated profile of hearing aid benefit (APHAB) was completed before and one month after using hearing aids to determine the benefit of them.
Results: Global APHAB mean scores for digital, programmable and analog hearing aids were 49.05, 33.19 and 39.53, respectively. Ease of Communication subscale mean scores were 53.46 for digitals, 37.66 for programmables and 39.09 for analogs. Background noise subscale mean scores for digital programmable and analog hearing aids were 46.36, 25.53 and 35.31, respectively. Global and also both subscale mean scores showed significant difference between digital hearing aids and programmable and analog ones. There was no significant difference between reverberation subscale mean scores of three groups.
Conclusion: It seems digital hearing aids may be more beneficial to reduce disability caused by hearing loss than analog and programmable hearing aids are.

Background and Aim: Although for a child to maximize his or her mastery of language, hearing aids (HAs) must consistently be worn, and they must be functioning correctly many studies indicates some hearing- impaired children`s hearing aid do not work perfectly.The purpose of this study was to determine types of defects in students&apos hearing aid (HA) in Tehran Exceptional Schools.

Materials and method: In this cross-sectional analytic study defects in sixty –two HAs of 41 children were determined. All were the students of Exceptional Schools referred to Audiology Clinic, Faculty of Rehabilitation Medical Sciences University of Tehran. Functions of the HAs were first checked by a sthetoclips. Then the electroacoustic measurements performed to determine the values of maximum gain and maximum power output. The data were separately recorded in a questionnaire for each kind of the HAs.

Results: Fifty-six percent of HAs functioned perfectly and forty-four percent were not. The most Frequet defects were 24% and 20% pertained to the battery and manual controls respectively. External components had more difficulties than internal components. Seventy percent of ear molds were damaged. There were significant differences between peak of FOG and MPO curves in the catalogue and electroacoustic measurements in 2cc coupler.

Conclusion: Most damaged parts of HAs in Tehran Exceptional students is related to the battery and controls which are external components of HAs. Because of high rate of dysfunctioning HAs and ear molds in this population in this survey, it is necessary to promote orientation and counseling level after fitting and to develop the quality of HAs and ear molds for Exceptional School students.

Background and Aim: Early diagnosis of hearing loss lead to early intervention and improvement of developmental skills of children with hearing loss. The present study aimed to determine the mean age of hearing loss diagnosis and cochlear implantation (CI) in hearing impaired children and to compare the age of performing cochlear implantation in children who were identified by newborn hearing screening with those who were not.
Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 96 children with severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss who received cochlear implantation in Amir-e-Alam cochlear implantation center between the years 2008 and 2010. For data gathering, we assessed subjects&apos medical archives, interviewed with their parents and took medical history including demographic information, birth history and hearing loss history.
Results: Mean age of hearing loss suspicion, diagnosis, hearing aids administration, Initiation of rehabilitation program, performing cochlear implantation and mean age when cochlear implantation was utilized were 6.73 (SD=5.79), 9.35 (SD=5.79), 13.41 (SD=6.10), 16 (SD=6.36), 41.25 (SD=11.12), and 42.15 (SD=11.00) months, respectively. There was statistically significant difference between them (p<0.05). 43.8% of hearing impaired children had been identified by newborn hearing screening. There was statistically significant difference between cochlear implantation operation age of children who were identified by newborn hearing screening with those who were not (p<0.0001).
Conclusion: In spite of notable reduction in the age of hearing loss diagnosis and intervention during recent years, compared to international indices it is still tardy. Conducting newborn hearing screening can significantly reduce these ages.

Background and Aim: Grammatical skills development of hearing-impaired children depends on using appropriate educational rehabilitation programs. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of linguistic plays on the grammatical skills in hearing-impaired children with hearing aids.

Methods: Ten hearing-impaired children with hearing aids, aged between 5 and 7, were randomly assigned to two groups (5 children in each group). Each treatment group received 12 sessions on linguistic plays. The grammatical skills of these children were evaluated via the TOLD-P: 3 (Persian version) in addition, their level of intelligence was assessed by the Raven test.

Results: The difference between the scores of both control and treatment groups revealed a statistically significant difference in grammatical skills (t=7.61, p=0.001) and three subskills of the children who participated in the linguistic plays. These subskills include syntactic understanding (t=3.16, p=0.013), sentence imitation (t=1.71, p=0.006), and morphological completion (t=6.55, p=0.001). In other words, the findings suggest that linguistic plays have a significant impact on the improvement of the aforementioned skills in hearing-impaired children.

Conclusion: Results suggest that it would be beneficial to include linguistic plays as part of routine rehabilitation programs as a means of improving the grammatical difficulties of children. After partaking in linguistic plays, children significantly improved their ability to comprehend the meaning of sentences and also to recognize, understand, and use common Persian morphological forms.