Test-Retest Reliability and Preliminary Validation of Smartphone-Based Threshold and Categorical loudness Measures in Home Settings.

Only 15 participants, all young (20–35), all normal hearing, all from one university — the authors explicitly call this a proof-of-concept and caution that reliability and correlation estimates may vary across samples. No hearing-impaired participants, so the results say nothing about how these methods perform in the population that would most need remote hearing assessment. All home testing took place in quiet rural or small-town settings in northwestern Germany (median 36 dBA); performance in noisier urban environments is unknown. A single test kit was used and calibrated once at the start of data collection; real-world variability in device calibration was not tested. The noise-monitoring app used the smartphone's built-in microphone with a single calibration offset at 1 kHz, which may not reflect true frequency-dependent calibration errors. The sample was recruited informally from the authors' own working groups and student body, raising the possibility of familiarity with the testing paradigm.

Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), grant 390895286. The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Do not read the comparable home-lab results as evidence that smartphone hearing tests are ready for clinical use in hearing-impaired patients. All 15 participants were young, normal-hearing, from one university, and tested in quiet rural settings. The authors themselves label this a proof-of-concept and state that validation in larger, more diverse, and hearing-impaired populations is still needed before these methods can inform clinical decisions.