HearAdvisor Procedures for Recording and Evaluating Hearing Devices
Introduction
It can be challenging for a hearing aid consumer to assess how well a device performs before purchasing. Our goal is to help hearing aid customers by providing realistic recordings and understandable metrics that empower them to make informed hearing aid purchase decisions. In this report we describe our approach to addressing this problem via lab recordings and scientific metrics (presented on a simple 0--5 point scale).
Designing appropriate recording methods and metrics is a complex task. There is a nearly infinite set of combinations of hearing losses, environments, and device settings. To make this effort feasible, we had to make many choices (descriptions and rationales are provided throughout this documentation). In all cases we attempted to leverage scientific research and to target the most likely scenarios. We tried to create realistic environments, repeatable procedures, and objective metrics. We acknowledge that our results might not represent all hearing losses, environments, and settings and we welcome feedback.
Documentation Overview
| Section | Description |
|---|---|
| Laboratory Setup | Acoustic test lab, speaker ring, KEMAR manikin |
| Recordings | Acoustic scenes, device insertion, music streaming, post-processing |
| Device Settings | Hearing loss target, initial and tuned fits, real ear measures |
| Metrics | Speech perception, occlusion, music quality, feedback, SoundScore |
| Results | Summary of findings across tested devices |
| Changelog | Version history and methodology changes |
| References | Full bibliography |
This documentation is version-controlled. Every change is tracked with a full history of what changed and why. See the Changelog for a summary of updates, or browse the commit history for full details.