Luka Bonetti

Harmonics to noise ratio in vocal professional voices

There is no arguing about the importance of voice, especially in groups of vocal professional voices. The question is what characterizes, the most, normal or pathological voice in relation to aspects of human working life. Harmonics to noise ratio, according to findings from the field of voice disorders, is the most representative method to differ normal from pathological voice. In this research significant differences were found in harmonics to noise ratio in relation to the length of the working age of 29 teachers of primary schools in Zagreb. Teachers with the longest working age (40‐yr.) showed the most distorted voices. The best quality of voice with great ratio of harmonics to noise was found in the group of teachers with 10 years of professional work. Acoustical analyses were made by ezvoiceplusTM version 2.0 and Gram. 2.3. Significant statistical differences were established by the T test of Statistica for Windows, version 4.5. [Work supported by Ministry of Science and Technology of Republic of C...

Validation of self-reported hearing loss among adult Croatians: the performance of the Hearing Self-Assessment Questionnaire against audiometric evaluation

Abstract Objective: The aim of this study was to validate the performance of a self-assessment hearing loss screening tool for adults against audiometric evaluation. Different audiological measurements were compared with the results of a 10-item Likert-type questionnaire named the Hearing Self-Assessment Questionnaire (HSAQ) to investigate its psychometric characteristics. Design: Participants underwent audiological evaluation and completed the HSAQ. The screening performance of the HSAQ was evaluated against three definitions of hearing loss: better-ear mean pure-tone thresholds >25 dBHL at 500–2000 Hz, 500–4000 Hz and 1000–4000 Hz. Study sample: The study enrolled 112 participants aged between 24 and 88 years (mean age 56.24 years, ±12.92). Results: The HSAQ had high Cronbachs alpha and intraclass correlation coefficients and showed construct, concurrent and discriminant validity. Its screening characteristics proved very good or excellent, depending on the definition of hearing loss. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis showed excellent accuracy of the HSAQ in the identification of better-ear high-frequency hearing loss and better-ear speech-frequency hearing loss, with respect to different cut-off points. Conclusions: Given the ease with which it is administered and its good screening properties, the HSAQ can be useful in deciding whether adult clients should be referred to audiological evaluation due to reasonable suspicion of hypoacusis.