%0 Journal Article
%T Listener Factors Explain Little Variability in Self-Adjusted Hearing
Aid Gain
%A Dianne J. Van Tasell
%A Peggy B. Nelson
%A Trevor T. Perry
%J Archive of "Trends in Hearing".
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/2331216519837124
%X Self-adjustment of hearing aid gain can provide valuable information about the gain preferences of individual listeners, but these preferences are not well understood. Listeners with mild-to-moderate hearing loss used self-adjustment to select amplification gain and compression parameters in real time on a portable touch screen device while listening in quiet and noisy backgrounds. Adjustments to gain prescribed by the National Acoustics Laboratories' non-linear fitting procedure (NAL-NL2) showed large between-subject variability. Known listener characteristics (age, gender, hearing thresholds, hearing aid experience, acceptable noise level, and external ear characteristics) and listener engagement with the self-adjustment software were examined as potential predictors of this variability. Neither listener characteristics nor time spent adjusting gain were robust predictors of gain change from NAL-NL2. Listeners with less than 2 years of hearing aid experience and who also had better hearing thresholds tended to select less gain, relative to NAL-NL2, than experienced hearing aid users who had poorer thresholds. Listener factors explained no more than 10% of the between-subject variance in deviation from NAL-NL2, suggesting that modifying prescriptive fitting formulae based on the factors examined here would be unlikely to result in amplification parameters that are similar to user-customized settings. Self-adjustment typically took less than 3£żmin, indicating that listeners could use comparable technology without a substantial time commitment
%K hearing aid fitting
%K amplification
%K background noise
%K acclimatization
%K hearing loss
%U https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6423677/