Sounds Perceived As Annoying by Hearing-aid Users in Their Daily Soundscape

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.