The value of headphone accommodations in Apple Airpods Pro for managing speech-in-noise hearing difficulties of individuals with normal audiograms

Abstract

Objective

To investigate the extent to which Headphone Accommodations in Apple AirPods Pro attend to the hearing needs of individuals with normal audiograms who experience hearing difficulties in noisy environments.

Design

Single-arm interventional study using acoustic measures, speech-in-noise laboratory testing, and real-world measures via questionnaires and ecological momentary assessment.

Study sample

Seventeen normal-hearing individuals (9 female, 21–59 years) with self-reported hearing-in-noise difficulties.

Results

Acoustic measures showed that, relative to unaided, AirPods Pro provided a SNR advantage of +5.4 dB. Speech intelligibility performance in laboratory testing increased 11.8% with AirPods Pro, relative to unaided. On average, participants trialling AirPods Pro in real-world noisy venues reported that their overall hearing experience was a bit better than without them. Five participants (29%) reported that they would continue using AirPods Pro in the future. The most relevant barriers that would discourage their future use were limited hearing benefit, discomfort, and stigma.

Conclusions

Occasional use of AirPods Pro may help some individuals with normal audiograms ameliorate their speech-in-noise hearing difficulties. The identified barriers may inspire the development of new technological solutions aimed at providing an optimal management strategy for the hearing difficulties of this segment of the population.

Keywords:

• Hearables
• hidden hearing loss
• over-the-counter hearing aids
• listening effort
• communication difficulties

Acknowledgements

The authors thank all the volunteers who participated in the study. The authors also thank Apple Inc. Australia (Sydney, Australia) for having lent 15 AirPods Pro devices for this study. Moreover, the authors gratefully acknowledge the technical assistance received by James Galloway and Greg Stewart; the project management support by Ignacio Spinetta; and the constructive input received by Catherine Morgan at the National Acoustic Laboratories (Sydney, Australia).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The raw data of this research and Matlab scripts that re-generate the figures are available as Supplementary Material in Appendix A.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Australian Government Department of Health and by a Maria Zambrano Fellowship funded by the European Union – Next Generation EU via the Ministry of Universities of the Spanish Government.