[3] Individuals who are diagnosed with Single Sided Deafness have difficulties with sound localization and speech in noise discrimination.
Examples of these causes are physical trauma, acoustic neuroma, maternal prenatal illness such as measles, labyrinthitis, microtia, meningitis, Ménière's disease, Waardenburg syndrome, mumps (epidemic parotitis), mastoiditis or due to an overstrained nervus vestibulocochlearis after a brain surgery to close to the nerve.
With speech and background noise presented at the same level, persons with unilateral deafness were found to listen only about 30–35% of the conversation.
[8] UHL also negatively affects hearing and comprehension by making it impossible for the patient to determine the direction, distance and movement of sound sources.
The implant then sends sound vibrations to the cochlea of the normal hearing ear through the skull via bone conduction.
The device is surgically implanted in the cochlea of non-hearing ear, with a sound processor worn externally.
[14] According to Snapp 2019, CROS technology solutions provide a noninvasive, aesthetically appealing, low-cost option for individuals with single sided deafness (SSD).
[17] The BONEBRIDGE system has been shown to provide good hearing outcomes, and patients also reported high subjective benefit.
[19] Sprinzl et al. (2016) also found that the BONEBRIDGE system had a lower complication rate when compared to other implanted bone conduction devices.
[22] Studies on the SoundBite system showed it to have strong hearing benefit and high patient satisfaction, particularly due to its non-surgical design.
[23] Cochlear implants (CIs) have been shown to benefit patients with unilateral hearing loss in terms of tinnitus reduction, localization, speech understanding, and quality of life (QoL).
[25] School-age children with unilateral hearing loss tend to have poorer grades and require educational assistance.
When wearing stereo headphones, people with unilateral hearing loss can hear only one channel, hence the panning information (volume and time differences between channels) is lost; some instruments may be heard better than others if they are mixed predominantly to one channel, and in extreme cases of sound production, such as complete stereo separation or stereo-switching, only part of the composition can be heard; in games using 3D audio effects, sound may not be perceived appropriately due to coming to the disabled ear.