Does the method matter? Evaluating the effectiveness, efficiency and ease of hearing-aid gain self-adjustment
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: ABSTRACT In conventional hearing-aid personalisation, clinicians cannot hear what their patients hear, and patients cannot often reliably detect or describe what they hear. Self-adjustment can reduce this issue but requires user controls that adjust hearing-aid signal processing parameters to be effective, efficient and easy. In this study, we explored (a) the roles of interface complexity and stimulus type in the self-adjustment of linear frequency-dependent gain, and (b) how well individuals can adjust one sound to match another to assess the same interfaces and stimuli. Adult hearing-aid users with mild to moderate symmetrical sensorineural hearing loss repeatedly adjusted the gain (a) to their preference from individual prescription ( n = 41) and (b) to match their previous preferences from a random starting point ( n = 32) using three interfaces representing different bass/mid/treble configurations and three stimuli (music, speech and speech-in-noise). Exploratory clustering of the interindividual preferred-gain variability suggested three patterns of deviation from initial prescription: increased relative bass, overall gain reduction, and close to initial prescription. There were no substantial effects of interface nor stimulus on self-adjustment reliability (median σ = 2.8 dB), whereas absolute sound-matching error increased with increasing interface complexity and centre frequency. Neither individual matching accuracy nor questionnaire responses predicted either self-adjusted gains or reliability. Overall, these results show that many – but not all – hearing-aid users can adjust gains with reasonable reliability, and while it can be difficult to predict the behaviour from the individual, the individual applies a similar self-adjustment behaviour across different interfaces and stimuli.
Source: medRxiv
Authors: Janin Benecke, William M. Whitmer
Institutions: University of Nottingham, University of Glasgow
Language: English
Subfield: Speech and Hearing
Field: Health Professions
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Medical Research Council
OpenAlex ID: W7164579527