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HearAdvisor - Compare Hearing Aid Performance

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For me, that’s not enough. Scoring system which is affected by assumptions of average use and ignorance is fundamentally flawed.
Just my opinion, which doesn’t really matter since I’m not the target audience.

You got some better ideas ? We’re open to suggestions. So far, no one has provided anything better for us… I’m not talking about just here on the forum… but in any of our conversations within the industry. So far everyone just says “it’s not perfect, but we can’t think of a better way” and to me, that says, we’ve got something that is better than nothing here… Your hearing loss isn’t our target anyway, so even if you did like our scoring, I’d tell you not to base any decisions on our scoring. Now, if someone’s “ignorant” grandparent had mild to moderate hearing loss and was considering their options, I’d absolutely tell them to use our scoreboard, but would also tell her to read the FAQ carefully to understand the vs Rx stuff… depending on the grandparent, that could go either way.

I do actually, but I think we both know that it would be pointless. Things are well underway and the fact that “industry” went along with this is telling me everything that I need to know.
You went too far with oversimplification to get the product to the market. While it might work for your intended target, I would love for your testing to eventually be useful to us all.

Edited
@Reginald said:

I do actually, but I think we both know that it would be pointless. Things are well underway and the fact that “industry” went along with this is telling me everything that I need to know.

You’re just making me laugh now. The manufacturers absolutely don’t love what we’re doing. Put that tinfoil hat back on and hit the road if you have nothing helpful to say.

Edit: Apologies for being suddenly rude, but your comments just seem overly critical and unhelpful… I’ve been very patient responding for a couple hours now, and it feels like we’ve made little progress. And now you’re just being rude to me imho, writing off our project off the way you did by making unfounded assumptions about us getting industry support.

In reply to @AbramBaileyAuD

@AbramBaileyAuD wrote:

And one more thing… in most cases the manufacturer actually recommends some type of occluding dome, which we went with for our initial fit test setups:

@RSW Opinion:
Thus those manufacturers who recommend open domes will have lower streaming performance then say the Oticon Intent with power domes and other high ranking with . No wonder things can look skewed for the ignorant users who might rely on your numbers as a fair and equal test. And, they may never try some of the other great HAs that maybe should have had these caveats spelled out in bold letters up front and not buried in a FAQ that ignorant score glancing users don’t read. And, you want to see these scores on product labels?

I would think an ignorant user who complains to their ‘aware’ about music, etc, after their first fitting would get the recommendation for more occluded domes and/or raising their default base levels, etc, like my Costco HCP did. Your tests assume an ignorant HCP as well. Your tests could show a second fitting showing what these HA test out as once they are more properly tuned by an HCP aware of the products they are selling. I think this maybe where you are missing the boat, or at least where some of the confusion is.

Well then you should love this project, because I can assure you, the industry hates it.
And thanks for the apology. All water under the bridge.

In reply to @AbramBaileyAuD

I do not mean the first fitting that some people are left with, who are not asked by an to come back after their first fitting, I mean a “tuned” pair of . For instance my HAs would not show the streaming results you show. They just would not.

@AbramBaileyAuD wrote:
The primary focus of this endeavor is to sort the good from the bad in the arena and prescription hearing aids are really just there as a baseline.

“This brand x OTC HA is better then these brand x,y,z prescription HAs.” (That happen to not be properly tuned)

That is what you are marketing and I disagree with the premise.

In reply to @Reginald

We are all very technical too, but again, have time and resource limitations. Please see our white paper if you haven’t already as it goes through everything that a technical person might want to know. If we’re able to get some support from consumers, that would go a long way to making this project viable and us expanding to other hearing losses and other acoustic setups… That is the end goal.

In reply to @RSW

@RSW said:

I do not mean the first fitting that some people are left with, who are not asked by an HCP to come back after their first fitting, I mean a “tuned” pair of HAs. For instance my HAs would not show the streaming results you show. They just would not.

The only way to truly know what the average fitting looks like for every hearing loss would be to look at actual fitting data across hundreds or thousands of people and look for averages, standard deviations, etc for each and every common hearing loss pattern … even then, often fail to document the actual dome on the end of the receiver in the fitting software, so it may be truly impossible to know… the other thing you can’t know from the software is how good the physical fit is… is the dome even well seated in the ear / are the directional mics well aligned to the horizontal plane … etc… this all changes what sound is actually being experienced at the eardrum. Also, what adjustments is the user making on their phone app or remote control? Where do they actually have their settings in various environments if they have manual control… so you see, it quickly becomes impossible to try to measure what people are actually experiencing in the wild, and we have to make some assumptions to best guess what the average person with mild to moderate hearing loss experiences in both the initial fit and audiologist-tuned conditions. I’d argue we’ve done as good a job as anyone possibly can… but again, there will never be a perfect set of assumptions that will suit every individual who looks at this data, no matter how many hearing losses and acoustic setups we try to measure…

PS. We debated those assumptions internally on very long calls and even within the team, it was very hard coming up with the decision trees we ultimately all agreed on… We thought very long and hard about these very difficult problems.

The thing is, Certyfying Bodies set their own standards for grading, otherwise it is impossible to be unbiased and to not be affected by myriads of externally set variables [like the variability of domes, they should all have been tested with universal one, disregarding manufacturers].

Edited

The closest thing we have in the hearing aid world is electroacoustic test box measures… That’s the kind of information the requires manufacturers hold on file in case of audit… But these measurements really only look at the most simple stuff like max gain and output, harmonic distortion, etc… Hearing aids are put into a test mode where all the sophisticated algorithms are disabled. There’s no certifying body for hearing aids that does anything that would be relevant to consumers.

To me making all the hearing aids have the same dome would be similar to putting the hearing aid in test mode with the algos disabled… you’re just getting further from what a real person would experience.

PS. See my comment from before. When we have the time and resources… we’ll endeavor to put up more of these acoustic setups for every hearing loss. Then you could potentially look and say, I want to use an open dome for my mild to moderate hearing loss… what would that look like with this set of devices I’m interested in… etc. Goals.

@AbramBaileyAuD said:

To me making all the hearing aids have the same dome would be similar to putting the hearing aid in test mode with the algos disabled… you’re just getting further from what a real person would experience.

I disagree, it’s impossible to get a common point of reference with algos [between manufacturers], when it comes to “real life” experience, but you can with domes or moulds.

Yes, true, but why compare scenarios that are unlikely to be common in reality? If the device is typically setup a different way for our target hearing loss, don’t we want to reflect that reality in our test setup?

Aside from that one time I lost my temper :sweat_smile: this has been mostly fun for me. I appreciate all the feedback, and honestly this whole thing is a big puzzle, and who knows where the answers will come from. Already talking to you, I can see how cool it will be to have all the test results I wish we had already. But, hey, I have to step away now to do some domestic stuff. Will check in again later, maybe tomorrow. Thanks for the engagement.

Edited

In reply to @AbramBaileyAuD

@AbramBaileyAuD said:

Yes, true, but why compare scenarios that are unlikely to be common in reality?

That’s how it is usually done isn’t it? :wink: To get a common point of reference, the baseline for comparisons, and it’s fine to base rest around that, the more life-like stuff.
You need both synthetic and real-life benchmarks to get a healthy overview.

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