Introduction
When asking hearing aid users about their challenges, the category hearing in noise most often top the list. However, the hearing in noise category covers many different situations making it difficult to identify what the actual challenge is, and consequently also identifying how it could be improved.
In hearing rehabilitation, the Client Oriented Scale of Improvement (COSI) is a tool where hearing aid users identify the situations they wish to improve upon with hearing aids, and subsequently the situations for which they rate their perceived improvement. While COSI gives a more detailed explanation of the situation in the users’ own words, it also lacks the detailed acoustic information about the situation. With this project we wish to better understand the acoustic circumstances around user pain points and individual COSI situations from combining it with data logging from hearing aids.
Aims
We want to explore the benefits from combining hearing aids that log information about the acoustic environment with mobile app where hearing aid users identify challenging situations and rate their hearing. We hope that our analysis will unlock a new set of detailed situations which our future hearing research can address.
Methodology
Test persons will get hearing aids with a personalized fitting and a prototype app on their phone where they can mark and rate situations that they find challenging while they experience them or shortly after. During fitting, test persons will formulate their COSI situations, and receive instructions on how to report back on their COSI situations with their app, and how they report back on the other challenging situations.
The test persons evaluate their COSI situations momentarily in the field with the app
