Nuheara engaged Australia’s world-leading hearing research organisation NAL, to conduct a clinical study to examine the validity and reliability of Ear ID™ automated hearing assessment technology for IQBuds Boost™ and IQbuds2 Max.
The Ear ID™ hearing assessment was shown to be as reliable as conventional clinical audiometry when conducted in a quiet environment. 97.5% of hearing thresholds derived by the Ear ID™ system were within 5dB of those measured on subsequent retests. Clinical audiometry includes such factors as having an audiologist conducting the hearing assessment, meaning that Nuheara has now broken the threshold of how hearing assessments can be reliably completed, and hearing devices configured, with the use of automated technology.
These results indicate a high level of repeatability of threshold determination using the technology.
MORE ABOUT THE STUDY:
The aim of the study was to determine whether Nuheara’s technology produces accurate hearing thresholds for individuals whose hearing is in the Ear ID’s target fitting range.
The evaluation was conducted independently by NAL at its Sydney research facility by university qualified research audiologists.
Thirty participants undertook audiometric testing using standard clinical methods and also measured their hearing thresholds with a pre-release version of Nuheara’s Ear ID™ hearing assessment technology in the same laboratory environment.
All participants were able to complete the Ear ID™ self-assessment process with minimal direction from the audiologist, and the majority of participants could derive accurate hearing thresholds using Ear ID for the frequencies tested in the study. Almost 70% of thresholds agreed exactly with those obtained using conventional audiometry.
In addition to comparing individual thresholds, four frequency average hearing thresholds (4FAHLs) were calculated for each method and compared as another measure of test validity. For 87% of participants, 4FAHLs calculated from the Ear ID assessment were within 5dB of those for the audiologist-administered hearing test. For the remaining 13% of cases, 4FAHLs from the Ear ID test were within 7.5dB of the audiologist-administered hearing test.