Hearing-aid engineers’ normal hearing blocks firsthand testing of devices
Evidence
That is, the engineers often have normal hearing, which means that they cannot test the devices thoroughly themselves. Moreover, the hearing aids should be suited for different types of impairment. Thus, a method to evaluate the speech quality with different severities and types of hearing impairment is potentially helpful in product development. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2450
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- SEED: Article angle: the problem of designers who cannot experience the very defects they design for—beyond hearing aids to interface design, accessibility, and product testing generally.
- CANDY: A fun, tweetable fact: hearing-aid engineers typically can’t hear hearing impairments, so they can’t test their own products.
Related
- Hearing aids normalize affect ratings across differing hearing loss severities (similarity 0.79)
- Normal-hearing test methods rarely transfer to hearing-impaired listeners (similarity 0.79)
- Industry relies on objective methods because exhaustive listening tests are impractical (similarity 0.79)
- Standard audiological tests miss most of the perceptual abilities humans need to communicate (similarity 0.78)