Innovations in Hearing Accessibility and Technology (IHAT) Study

It is a 24-item self-reported measure of hearing disability and hearing aid benefit. It includes four subscales that address different listening challenges: ease of communication, reverberation, background noise, and aversiveness of sounds, with each subscales comprising six items. The ease of communication, reverberation, and background noise primarily measure challenges related to speech communication. The global score on the APHAB is the average of these three subscale scores. The hearing aid benefit is calculated by comparing the difficulty level reported without amplification (unaided) to the difficulty level with amplification (aided). Scores range from 1% to 99%, with higher scores indicating greater perceived hearing difficulty.

SADL is a 15-item self-reported outcome measure that evaluates an individual's satisfaction with their hearing aids on a 7-point rating scale. The questionnaire is divided into four subscales. The positive effect subscale quantifies improved performance with hearing aids. The personal image subscale quantifies self-image and stigma. The negative feature subscale evaluates undesirable aspects of using hearing aids. The service and cost subscale assesses the adequacy of the professional's service and the device's cost. Higher scores indicate greater satisfaction with hearing aids.

It is a 10-item self-perceived hearing handicap measure that can be used for adults of all ages. The response options on this scale are yes (4), sometimes (2), and no (0), and ranges from 0 to 40. The total score is the sum of all the responses, with higher scales indicating greater perceived difficulties.

PGI-C assesses the patient's belief about the efficacy of treatment with a single-item questionnaire on a 7-point rating scale. Lower scores indicate improved outcomes.

The connected speech test is a sentence intelligibility test consisting of 48 passages with 8-10 sentences of a connected discourse spoken by a female speaker. A pair of passages will be presented to the participant, and the 25 keywords in each passage will be scored for percentage correct score. A higher percentage correct score indicates higher sentence intelligibility.

It assesses the patient's ability to hear in background noise. The patient repeats sentences that are embedded in different noisy environments and the result is a signal-to-noise ratio loss. The test stimuli are pre-recorded sentences embedded in speech babble at varying signal-to-noise ratios from easy to very difficult.