How Individuals Shape Their Acoustic Environment: Implications for Hearing Aid Comparison in Ecological Momentary Assessment.
Iris Borschke, Tim Jürgens, Nadja Schinkel-Bielefeld
PMID 38514463WHAT IT FOUND
Hearing aid users reported modifying or leaving difficult listening situations about 2.3 times per day.
Most changes made situations feel much more pleasant, and behavior differed between two hearing programs, though many differences were not clear.
Key findings
01Participants reported 2.28 situations per day that they modified or wanted to modify, and the two hearing programs did not differ in this count.
02When a situation was modified, pleasantness ratings were 2.9 before and 5.1 after on a 7-point scale.
03The NR-on program was used 1.45 hr longer per day than NR-off, and it had more reported hearing aid volume increases, but this difference was borderline after correction.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study included 29 experienced bilateral hearing aid users in Germany, so results may not apply to new users, people with different hearing loss, or other countries. Hearing aids were fitted remotely during the pandemic, with no real ear measurement check, so the fit may not have been optimal. The study compared extreme hearing aid settings rather than the manufacturer-recommended settings, so differences between programs may not reflect ordinary clinical fitting. Participants were asked to report modifications, which may raise awareness and change behavior; some modifications are likely subconscious or not reported. The pandemic reduced normal situations, and participants reported more or different modifications with study hearing aids than with their own devices, so daily behavior may be distorted. Self-report questionnaires can be biased, and situations not reported immediately may be missed or distorted by memory. The study analyzed sound pressure level but not signal-to-noise ratio, and it did not cover non-acoustic modifications such as subtitles or lipreading.
Declared interests
The supplied text gives ethics approval and data availability, but does not state funding sources or author conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that NR-on hearing aids are better or that hearing aid comparisons are invalid. The study describes how users modify situations. It was not designed to prove a hearing aid works, and many differences between programs were not clear.