Speech Related Hearing Aid Benefit Index Derived from Standardized Self-Reported Questionnaire Data

The present work is inspired by the thought of having a single index to
scale the hearing aid (HA) benefit from self-reported questionnaires. Previous studies have shown that speech understanding in noisy environments is one of the most desired improvements sought by hearing aid users [1, 2].
The perceived HA benefit thus can depend on the facilitation of everyday communication in challenging environments by the HA. This should
also ideally reflect in self-reported questionnaires responses recorded in
the BEAR project. Single index scale would facilitate the identification of
a sub-population, if there exist, with a low-compensation benefit from the
usage of hearing aid.
The self-reported questionnaire responses recorded during the follow-up
visit 2 months after the initial fit, show a stronger correlation (Figure 1)
of 15D question 3 related to speech understanding, to the 17 questions of
SSQ, and three questions from IOI-HA (Question 3, 5, and 6), which were
also part of the same survey (Figure 2). Further, a composite single value
index created from speech-related questions (SRQ) that are part of the survey can be a good representation of the perceived hearing aid benefit.