What is the BAHA (Bone Anchored Hearing Aid)?
The BAHA is a partially implanted hearing aid for patients who do not get benefit from conventional hearing aids. Candidates for the BAHA include people who lack an outer ear or ear canal opening, people who have chronic middle ear infections, chronically draining ears, people who have a conductive hearing loss that cannot be treated medically, and patients who are deaf in one ear with normal or near normal hearing in the other ear. A surgical procedure is performed to place a small titanium implant in the skull behind the ear. After healing, a sound processor is attached to the implant. The sound is delivered to the inner ear through bone conduction, bypassing the outer and middle ear and stimulating the inner ear. In patients with single sided deafness the sound is delivered directly to the good ear via bone conduction and eventually the brain is able to distinguish between sound that comes from the deaf side via the BAHA and sound that comes directly from the hearing ear. To learn m
