Does the method matter? Quantitative and qualitative perspectives in hearing-aid gain personalization

In conventional hearing-aid personalization, clinicians cannot hear how their patients hear, and patients often cannot reliably detect or describe what they hear. Letting individuals self-adjust gains could overcome these issues but requires methods to be effective, efficient, and easy. To better understand self-adjustments, the current study evaluated how interfaces and stimuli affect self-adjustment as well as how individuals navigate their way through the personalization process. Current hearing-aid users repeatedly adjusted the gain of music, speech, and speech-in-noise excerpts from an individual prescription to their preference. In a second session, the same participants verbalized their thoughts while adjusting to preference the same stimuli. Both tasks used three interfaces with 1, 2, and 3 user-controls (±18 dB) representing different bass-mid-treble configurations. Participants’ self-adjusted gains were generally reliable, invariant across stimuli and could be clustered into three patterns across individuals: increased relative bass, overall reduction, and near initial prescription. Analysis of verbalizations revealed two thought-behavior archetypes: exploratory and anticipatory. While it can be difficult to predict individuals’ preferences, each individual may apply similar self-adjustment behaviors across stimuli and interfaces. Identifying and promoting these behaviors can provide more efficient and effective hearing-aid personalization. [Work supported by the Medical Research Council & GN Hearing A/S.]