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Abstract
Background: The noises in modern soundscapes continue to increase and are a major origin for annoyance. For a hearing-impaired person, a hearing aid is often beneficial, but noise and annoying sounds can result in non-use of the hearing aid, temporary or permanently. Objective: The purpose of this study was to identify annoying sounds in a daily soundscape for hearing-aid users. Design: A diary was used to collect data where the participants answered four questions per day about annoying sounds in the daily soundscape over a two-week period. Study sample: Sixty adult hearing-aid users. Results: Of the 60 participants 91% experienced annoying sounds daily when using hearing aids. The annoying sound mentioned by most users, was verbal human sounds, followed by other daily sound sources categorized into 17 groups such as TV/radio, vehicles, and machine tools. When the hearing-aid users were grouped in relation to age, hearing loss, gender, hearing-aid experience, and type of signal processing used in their hearing aids, small and only few significant differences were found when comparing their experience of annoying sounds. Conclusions: The results indicate that hearing-aid users often experience annoying sounds and improved clinical fitting routines may reduce the problem.
Notes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Kerstin Möller for assistance with the data analysis. We are also grateful to three anonymous reviewers and the section editor, William Noble, for valuable comments.
Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.
Notes
1. Sloping hearing loss is defined here as a hearing loss that has a general trend of increasing with frequency.
2. A rehabilitation was deemed successful when the set out goal for the rehabilitation was reached according to both patient and audiologist.
3. Content analysis originally emerged during the 1950s in order to find objective, systematic, and quantitative descriptors of communication. Content analysis is a method of interpreting text data, such as diaries, in a structured way and is used for both quantitative and qualitative research (Graneheim & Lundman, Citation2004).
4. When subgrouping according to worse ear the numbers in the three groups were: better than 40 dB HL (15 persons), 40 to 50 dB HL (28 persons), and worse than 50 dB HL (17 persons).
5. The attack time for the gain control in a hearing aid is often in the order of 10 to 40 ms, while the rise time for impulse-like sounds are often below 1 ms.