Hearing-aid benefit studies lack an agreed threshold for meaningful SNR improvement

Evidence

Despite decades of research in speech intelligibility, it is not currently known how much improvement in SNR is needed to provide a meaningful benefit to someone. We propose that the underlying psychophysical basis to a meaningful benefit should be the just noticeable difference (JND) for SNR. … The results across different rating and willingness-to-change tasks showed that the mean ratings increased near linearly with a change in SNR, but a change of at least 6 dB was necessary to reliably motivate participants to seek intervention. The magnitude of the JNDs and JMDs for speech-intelligibility benefits measured here suggest a gap between what is achievable and what is meaningful. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5666

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to audiology/hearing-aid outcome literature on minimal clinically important difference (MCID); the ‘meaningful benefit’ construct parallels MCID work in other fields.