Speech related hearing aid benefit index derived from standardized self-reported questionnaire data

Speech understanding in noisy environments has been the most desired hearing aid (HA) benefit sought by hearing aid users. This paper examines the possibility of developing a speech related HA benefit index from correlated speech related questions from three different self-reported questionnaire's (SSQ12, IOI-HA, and 15D). The 4 questions in SSQ12 (question number 1,4,11 and 12), 3 questions in IOI-HA(question number 3,5 and 6) and 3rd question from health-related quality of life questionnaire 15D relating to speech were found correlated and are chosen for further analysis. After the normalization of the relevant questions, a principal component analysis (PCA) is used to reduce the dimensionality and determine the coefficients. The resultant coefficients are used to create a common speech related HA benefit index.