The Acoustic Environments in Which Older Adults Wear Their Hearing Aids: Insights From Datalogging Sound Environment Classification.
Larry E Humes, Sara E Rogers, Anna K Main and 1 others
PMID 30267099WHAT IT FOUND
Older first-time hearing aid users spent most logged wear time in quiet or moderate speech-only settings.
Noise-group users wore aids less daily, and average use fell from 7.0 to 4.4 hours over follow-up.
Key findings
01The typical wearer spent about 60% of logged time in quiet or moderate speech-only environments, and high-level speech or noise environments generally occurred less than 5% of the time.
02Wearers clustered into Quiet (about 35%), Speech (41%), and Noise (24%) groups, and the Noise group had significantly less daily hearing aid use (M = 5.1 h) than the Quiet (M = 7.7 h) and Speech (M = 7.2 h) groups.
03Over follow-up, average daily hearing aid use fell from 7.0 hr to 4.4 hr, while the sound environments were largely stable.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study describes where hearing aids were worn; it does not test whether hearing aids improve communication or whether changing environments changes outcomes. The sound environment classification was built into the study hearing aids, and its validation was limited and not peer-reviewed, so exact environment labels may not be fully trustworthy. Datalogging captured only time when the hearing aids were on, not the wearer's full day, so unaided environments were not measured. The sample was mostly retired, highly educated, and from southcentral Indiana, and all participants used one hearing aid model with fixed settings, so patterns may not apply to other hearing aid models, settings, or communities. Separate right and left environment logs were available for only 60 of 128 wearers, and cluster quality was fair rather than good. The long-term sample included 65 adults, but only 56 of the 128 wearers had data for both the 6-week and long-term periods.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that hearing aids were worn throughout the day or in all environments. The records show only time with the aids on, and daily wear time was 5.1 h for the noise group and fell from 7.0 h to 4.4 h over follow-up.