As noted by the volume editors, Popelka and Moore, in the Volume Preface, “This volume provides an overview of current key issues in hearing aid research from the perspective of many different disciplines…The book should prove useful to people with a wide range of backgrounds, including engineers, basic scientists, ENT specialists, and audiologists…” (p. vii). Overall, the volume accomplishes this goal. It does so through a series of 11 chapters authored by leaders in many of the same fields comprising the targeted readership. The volume opens and closes with chapters by the two volume co-editors, the first providing an introduction to hearing aids as background and the last pointing to future directions for hearing aid research and development. In between these opening and closing chapters, the reader will find a wide assortment of topics covered beginning with a comprehensive review of the epidemiology of hearing impairment (Chap. 2). Next, three chapters, focused on various aspects of the technology or the device itself, are provided (transducers in Chap. 3, signal processing in Chap. 4, and wireless/connectivity features in Chap. 5). The next three chapters, Chaps. 6, 7, and 8, present overviews of research findings regarding the perceptual performance of hearing aid wearers with regard to speech perception, spatial perception, and music perception, respectively. Finally, Chaps. 9 and 10 turn to hearing-aid performance in the somewhat more clinical contexts of verification of performance on wearers (Chap. 9) and validation of functional improvements from hearing aids via outcome measures (Chap. 10), primarily focusing on self-report surveys.
As someone who, for the past few decades, has conducted research in many of the areas reviewed in this volume and who has frequently had the opportunity to teach much of this material to professional audiology students and graduate students, I found the volume to be excellent overall with clear presentations of the material on the topics noted above. Many of the chapters on functional benefits provided by hearing aids provide comprehensive reviews and syntheses of the relevant literature, almost on par with the standards for formal “systematic reviews” of the literature. Those chapters that dealt with the technology per se provide easy-to-follow background about the technology under review and nice depictions of the progression of that technology over the past several decades, including the advantages gained through those changes. The treatment of these topics is balanced as well such that technology changes that have not led to the anticipated benefits are also noted.
Of course, as is almost always the case with edited volumes, there are some redundancies in coverage across chapters and some gaps in coverage. Given, as noted in several places, including Chaps. 1 and 2, most purchasers of hearing aids world-wide are adults over 60 years of age, it was a bit surprising to find few pointers in the chapters on various aspects of perception and functional benefit to the reviews included in a prior Springer Handbook of Auditory Research volume on aging and hearing [The Aging Auditory System, Vol. 34 of Springer Handbook of Auditory Research, edited by S. Gordon-Salant, R. D. Frisina, A. N. Popper, and R. R. Fay (Springer, New York, 2010)]. In addition, there is little to no mention of hearing-aid candidacy, orientation, counseling, communication training, and various models of hearing-aid provision and their impact on the benefits measured. Of course, these topics could themselves be the focus of a separate volume. Complete coverage of all topics pertinent to hearing aids is not possible in a single volume nor was it the intention of the co-editors of this volume. All told, the redundancies or gaps in coverage are few in number and easily tolerated.
In summary, this book would be a valuable desk reference for those professionals targeted for readership: engineers, basic scientists, ENT specialists, and audiologists. For clinical graduate students in audiology, it would serve well as a supplement to a required textbook on hearing aids, one that would offer broader and more even coverage of all of the relevant information. This too seems to be agree with the co-editor's intentions for this volume. As the co-editors note on p. 3, “This book should be regarded as complementing existing books on hearing aids.” I agree and believe it would offer a very nice complement for such texts.