Abstract
OBJECTIVES: The objective of this research is to find the factors associated with tinnitus masker from the literature, and by using the large amount of audiology data available from a large NHS (National Health Services, UK) hearing aid clinic. The factors evaluated were hearing impairment, age, gender, hearing aid type, mould and clinical comments. DESIGN: The research includes literature survey for factors associated with tinnitus masker, and performs the analysis of audiology data using statistical and data mining techniques. SETTING: This research uses a large audiology data but it also faced the problem of limited data for tinnitus. PARTICIPANTS: It uses 1,316 records for tinnitus and other diagnoses, and 10,437 records of clinical comments from a hearing aid clinic. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME MEASURES: The research is looking for variables associated with tinnitus masker, and in future, these variables can be combined into a single model to develop a decision support system to predict about tinnitus masker for a patient. RESULTS: The results demonstrated that tinnitus maskers are more likely to be fit to individuals with milder forms of hearing loss, and the factors age, gender, type of hearing aid and mould were all found significantly associated with tinnitus masker. In particular, those patients having Age < =55 years were more likely to wear a tinnitus masker, as well as those with milder forms of hearing loss. ITE (in the ear) hearing aids were also found associated with tinnitus masker. A feedback on the results of association of mould with tinnitus masker from a professional audiologist of a large NHS (National Health Services, UK) was also taken to better understand them. The results were obtained with different accuracy for different techniques. For example, the chi-squared test results were obtained with 95% accuracy, for Support and Confidence only those results were retained which had more than 1% Support and 80% Confidence. CONCLUSIONS: The variables audiograms, age, gender, hearing aid type and mould were found associated with the choice of tinnitus masker in the literature and by using statistical and data mining techniques. The further work in this research would lead to the development of a decision support system for tinnitus masker with an explanation that how that decision was obtained.