Variability of self-adjusted gain characteristics (Kursun et al., 2025)
Purpose: Although users can customize the frequency–gain response of hearing aids, the variability in their individual adjustments remains a concern. This study investigated the within-subject variability in the gain adjustments made within a single self-adjustment procedure.
Method: Two experiments were conducted with 20 older adults with mild-to-severe hearing loss. Participants used a two-dimensional touchscreen to adjust hearing aid amplification across six frequency bands (0.25–8 kHz) while listening to continuous speech in background noise. In these two experiments, two user interface designs, differing in control-to-gain map, were tested. For each participant, the statistical properties of 30 repeated gain adjustments within a single self-adjustment procedure were analyzed.
Results: When participants made multiple gain adjustments, their preferred gain settings showed the highest variability in the 4- and 8-kHz frequency bands and the lowest variability in the 1- and 2-kHz bands, suggesting that midfrequency bands are weighted more heavily in their preferences compared to high frequencies. Additionally, significant correlations were observed for the preferred gains between the 0.25- and 0.5-kHz bands, between the 0.5- and 1-kHz bands, and between the 4- and 8-kHz bands. Lastly, the standard error of the preferred gain reduced with an increasing number of trials, with a rate close to being slightly shallower than would be expected for invariant mean preference for most participants, suggesting convergent estimation of the underlying preference across trials.
Conclusion: Self-adjustments of frequency–gain profiles are informative about the underlying preference; however, the contributions from various frequency bands are neither equal nor independent.
Supplemental Material S1. Experiment instruction pages.
Kursun, B., Shola, C., Cunio, I. E., Langley, L., & Shen, Y. (2025). Variability of preference-based adjustments on hearing aid frequency–gain response. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_JSLHR-24-00215
