In situ basics

I only have the Oticon Genie 2 software, but the fundamental idea of in-situ audiometry should be the same for any brand of aid. And it’s really the same as the HCP doing an audiogram test for you in a quiet booth. The only difference is that with in-situ, you do it with your hearing aids on you and not inside a quiet booth with a pair of calibrated headphones on. But you do want to do it at home in a quiet environment with no external noises and distraction (like maybe the sound of the fridge or dishwasher running in the kitchen, or the washer or dryer running in a nearby laundry room. Ideally you don’t want the furnace or AC unit running while doing it either.

Anyway, as with the audiogram test in the HCP’s office in the quiet booth, you start walking through the various frequency tones from low to high with the softest volume first, and keep increasing it until you can hear the tone, and this would be the threshold of your hearing at that frequency. Then you go to the next frequency and do the same thing until you’re done with one ear, then move on and do the same for the other ear. Once it’s all done, the software will ask if you want to re-prescribe your gain based on the in-situ result instead of keeping the currently prescribed gain that’s based on your audiogram.

Note that there may be a personal bias when you conduct the in-situ test, because you know when you push that button to trigger the tone generation. This associative action may cause you to recognize the tone sooner than if the HCP conducts the test, because you can anticipate when to hear the tone. So there’s a chance that you can hear the tone at a lower threshold if you conduct the test yourself.

I don’t know about the other software, but the Oticon Genie 2 in-situ doesn’t do any uncomfortable loudness testing as far as I know, but the normal audiogram usually includes that data. So I think the in-situ would still use the same uncomfortable level data as provided in the audiogram even though the threshold data is from the in-situ result.