How To Tell If Your Hearing Aids Are Working Their Best

Many hearing aid users find themselves in a familiar situation: when asked about their hearing aids' performance, they respond with something like "I think they're working well" or "they definitely help." While this positive feedback is encouraging, it raises an important question—are your hearing aids truly optimized for maximum performance?

The challenge lies in the subjective nature of hearing improvement. Your ability to hear varies dramatically depending on your environment. You might hear perfectly well during a quiet conversation at home but struggle significantly in a noisy restaurant. This variation makes it difficult to assess whether your hearing aids are performing at their peak potential.

Unfortunately, many hearing care professionals rely on general questions about satisfaction rather than conducting thorough assessments to determine if hearing aids are truly optimized. This approach leaves many users wondering if they could be hearing even better with proper adjustments.

The good news is that there are three specific ways to determine with certainty whether your hearing aids are working at their maximum capacity. These methods represent industry best practices that separate exceptional hearing care from basic fitting services.

Test Box Measures: The Foundation of Hearing Aid Performance

Test box measures, also known as electroacoustic analysis, serve as the diagnostic foundation for hearing aid performance. Think of this process like taking your car to a mechanic who connects it to a computer to identify any potential issues before they become problems.

This testing measures critical aspects of your hearing aids' function, including output levels, gain settings, distortion rates, and internal noise levels. Each of these measurements must fall within specific tolerance ranges established by the manufacturer. If any measurement falls outside these parameters, the hearing aid fails diagnostics and requires repair or adjustment.

Here's what makes test box measures so important: it's impossible to identify specification failures simply by listening to the hearing aids. You can't detect whether the gain is three decibels below the acceptable range or if distortion levels are running at 7% instead of the required 4% or lower. Only precise electronic testing can reveal these performance issues.

When test box measures reveal problems, the hearing aids must be repaired either by your hearing care professional or sent back to the manufacturer. Only devices that meet all manufacturer specifications can deliver optimal hearing performance.

Real Ear Measurement: Precise Programming Verification

Real Ear Measurement represents the gold standard for verifying that your hearing aids are programmed correctly to match your specific hearing loss prescription. This process involves placing tiny probe microphone tubes in your ears alongside your hearing aids.

During the measurement, calibrated sounds are played from a speaker positioned in front of you while the system measures exactly how much amplification you're receiving across different frequencies. This data is then compared to your prescribed hearing loss requirements.

The results appear as two lines on a graph: a hash-marked line representing your prescription targets and a solid line showing the actual amplification being delivered in your ear canals. Optimal performance occurs when these lines overlap as closely as possible across all frequency ranges.

If you're receiving too much amplification in certain frequencies, your hearing care professional can use Real Ear Measurement data to reduce those levels precisely. Similarly, if you're under-amplified in specific ranges, they can increase the amplification to meet your prescriptive targets.

This verification process is absolutely critical because it's impossible to know if your hearing aids are programmed correctly without Real Ear Measurement. When properly verified, you'll experience substantially better hearing not just in quiet environments, but in challenging noisy situations as well.

Even if you feel satisfied with your current hearing aid performance, you cannot know for certain whether they're working at their best without Real Ear Measurement verification. We ensure that all of our patients receive this verification as part of our comprehensive fitting process.

Validated Outcome Measures: Quantifying Your Success

The third component for ensuring optimal hearing aid performance involves validated outcome measures—detailed pre and post-treatment assessments that quantify your improvement across various listening situations.

These assessments differ significantly from general satisfaction questions. Instead of asking "Do you think you're hearing better?", validated questionnaires examine specific scenarios and challenges you face in daily life. Common assessment tools include the Client Oriented Scale of Improvement (COSI), the Abbreviated Profile of Hearing Aid Benefit (APHAB), and the International Outcome Inventory for Hearing Aids (IOI-HA).

The timing of these assessments is crucial. The pre-assessment must be completed before your hearing aid fitting to establish a baseline of your hearing challenges. You cannot accurately recall your pre-treatment difficulties after weeks of wearing hearing aids.

The post-assessment should occur at least 30 days after your initial fitting because your brain requires approximately this amount of time to fully adapt to new hearing aids. Conducting the assessment too early may not reflect your true adapted performance level.

Properly administered validation measures should demonstrate significant benefit in the areas where you wanted improvement. If certain areas show insufficient progress, your hearing care professional must either make additional adjustments to improve performance or explain why further improvement may not be possible given your specific hearing loss characteristics.

At the completion of this process, you should have precise knowledge of how much benefit you're receiving from your hearing aids and whether any additional improvements are possible.

The Importance of Comprehensive Best Practices

These three components—test box measures, Real Ear Measurement, and validated outcome measures—work together to ensure maximum hearing aid performance. If any one of these elements is missing from your care, it becomes impossible to verify that you're hearing your best with your devices.

Many hearing care professionals unfortunately skip one or more of these steps, leaving patients to wonder whether they could be hearing better. When all three best practice procedures are properly implemented, you can be confident that your hearing aids are delivering optimal performance for your specific hearing loss and lifestyle needs.

Finding the Right Hearing Care Professional

The difference between adequate and exceptional hearing aid outcomes often comes down to finding a hearing care professional committed to following comprehensive best practices. Not all providers implement these verification procedures, which explains why some hearing aid users experience better outcomes than others with similar hearing losses.

Excellence with HearingUp Network Providers

When you're ready to experience the difference that proper hearing aid fitting and verification can make, consider working with a HearingUp Network provider. Every audiologist in our network has been personally vetted by Dr. Cliff Olson and demonstrates a commitment to following comprehensive best practices, including Real Ear Measurement and validated outcome measures.

Our network providers understand that achieving optimal hearing aid performance requires more than simply dispensing devices—it requires thorough testing, precise verification, and ongoing validation of your success. Schedule a consultation with a HearingUp provider today to discover how proper best practice care can help you hear your absolute best.