Cochlear implants are implantable devices designed to provide sound detection and speech recognition for people who receive little or no benefit from hearing aids.

Cochlear Implant Basic Information - The Impaired Ear - Degrees of Hearing Loss

The degree of hearing loss is generally classified as mild, moderate, severe, or profound. Hearing loss that borders between two categories is typically described as a combination of the two categories (for example, thresholds at 60 dB HL might be called moderate-to-severe). The exact cutoff points for each category vary slightly according to different publications and different audiologists, but they are roughly as follows:

Audiometric thresholds ranging from 25-40 dB HL constitute a mild hearing loss:

Audiometric thresholds ranging from 40-60 dB HL constitute a moderate hearing loss:

Audiometric thresholds ranging from 60-80 dB HL constitute a severe hearing loss:

Audiometric thresholds ranging from about 80-90 dB HL constitute a severe-to-profound hearing loss:

Audiometric thresholds greater than 90 dB HL constitute a profound hearing loss: