Does the method matter? Evaluating the effectiveness, efficiency and ease of hearing-aid gain self-adjustment
- 1Hearing Sciences - Scottish Section, University of Nottingham
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 {sigma} = 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.
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BibTeX
@misc{benecke2026does,
title = {{Does the method matter? Evaluating the effectiveness, efficiency and ease of hearing-aid gain self-adjustment}},
author = {J. Benecke and W. M. Whitmer},
howpublished = {medRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = jun,
doi = {10.64898/2026.06.11.26355463},
url = {https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.11.26355463v2},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Does the method matter? Evaluating the effectiveness, efficiency and ease of hearing-aid gain self-adjustment
AU - J. Benecke
AU - W. M. Whitmer
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/06/11
PB - medRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.06.11.26355463
UR - https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.11.26355463v2
AB - 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 {sigma} = 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.
ER -