Auditory Environments and Hearing Aid Feature Activation Among Younger and Older Listeners in an Urban and Rural Area.
Erik Jorgensen, Jingjing Xu, Octav Chipara and 3 others
PMID 36534639WHAT IT FOUND
Younger urban listeners encountered louder, more varied sounds and activated hearing aid noise reduction more often than older rural listeners.
The ALDQ questionnaire failed to detect these differences, suggesting clinicians should not rely on it alone to assess lifestyle demands.
Key findings
01The younger urban group had significantly higher median sound levels and greater variance in sound levels between environments compared to the older rural group.
02Hearing aid features like directional microphones and noise reduction were activated more frequently in younger urban listeners than in older rural listeners.
03The Auditory Lifestyle and Demand Questionnaire (ALDQ) showed no significant differences between groups and did not correlate with objective measures of sound levels.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study could not separate the effects of age from hearing loss because it lacked groups of younger people with hearing loss or older people with normal hearing. Only two locations were used (Iowa City and Berkeley), so results may not apply to other urban or rural areas. The sample size was small (46 participants) and the data collection period was short (one week). Bluetooth connection issues meant data was collected less frequently than intended, and it is unknown if this missing data biased the results.
Declared interests
Funding was provided by the NIH and U.S. Government. The study used Starkey hearing aids, and the authors state that Starkey provided updated procedures for the research firmware.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that older rural hearing aid users have lower auditory lifestyle demands simply because their ALDQ scores are similar to younger urban users. The questionnaire failed to capture the objective differences in sound levels and feature activation found in this study.