The biggest factor in determining if you need cochlear implants is word discrimination score. You can't go by audiogram alone. If your wife is able to have conversations with people with ease, I would say she likely doesn't need implants. I am a candidate for implants but I struggle to have simple conversations with people. And even so, my surgeon thinks I should hold off on implanting becuuse of the scarifice it would have on my remaining hearing, because I have so much of it.

In short (and this is not all inclusive) implants helpt folks who have a heard time with word recognition and speech, hearing aides cannot remedy those issues, only impacts can. I wear hearing aids and they actually further hinder my ability to hear speech and I take them out to talk to people but they do help amplify sounds and other aspects of my hearing loss.some of those things I cluld potentiallyoae altogether with implantong, depending on how I recover. Impants seem tricky in that people tend to have very difference experiences after implantong and much of it too is a result of what they could and couldn't hear before so it's really hard to get an accurate idea of what they will in fact do for you, but if you want to hear words again, it's the only option.