Characteristics of Real-World Signal to Noise Ratios and Speech Listening Situations of Older Adults With Mild to Moderate Hearing Loss.
Yu-Hsiang Wu, Elizabeth Stangl, Octav Chipara and 3 others
PMID 29466265WHAT IT FOUND
Most everyday conversations for older adults with hearing loss happen in quiet or diffuse noise with the speaker in front and visible.
Very noisy situations are rare. Lab tests should mimic these common, positive-signal conditions to better predict real-world success.
Key findings
01The most frequent listening situations involved a talker in front of the listener with visual cues available, occurring in both quiet and noisy environments.
02Signal-to-noise ratios were positive in the majority of situations, with only 7.5% of recorded instances having a negative SNR.
03Simulating just six of the identified prototype listening situations would represent 71% of daily speech listening experiences.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The audio recorder was worn at chest level, not ear level, which may have affected SNR measurements, particularly for sounds coming from behind. The device could not accurately measure sounds below 40 dBA or above 80 dBA, potentially underestimating the frequency of very quiet or very noisy situations. Participants were older adults living in rural and suburban areas with mild-to-moderate hearing loss, so findings may not generalize to younger people, those with severe loss, or urban populations. The survey prompt interval was two hours, which may have caused participants to miss or fail to report on very brief or extremely noisy interactions.
Declared interests
The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The participants were fit with hearing aids as part of a larger project comparing premium and basic hearing aid models, but the data for this specific paper was pooled across all conditions.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that standard laboratory speech-in-noise tests with negative SNRs and no visual cues accurately reflect the patient's daily communication success. The data shows that most real-world listening happens with positive SNRs and visual support, so poor performance on artificial difficult tests may not predict functional difficulty in common scenarios.