Implementing Ecological Momentary Assessment in Audiological Research: Opportunities and Challenges.

Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is a way to evaluate experiences in everyday life. It is a powerful research tool but can be complex and challenging for beginners. Application of EMA in audiological research brings with it opportunities and challenges that differ from other research disciplines. This tutorial discusses important considerations when conducting EMA studies in hearing care. While more research is needed to develop specific guidelines for the various potential applications of EMA in hearing research, we hope this article can alert hearing researchers new to EMA to pitfalls when using EMA and help strengthen their study design. The current article elaborates study design details, such as choice of participants, representativeness of the study period for participants' lives, and balancing participant burden with data requirements. Mobile devices and sensors to collect objective data on the acoustic situation are reviewed alongside different possibilities for EMA setups ranging from online questionnaires paired with a timer to proprietary apps that also have access to parameters of a hearing device. In addition to considerations for survey design, a list of questionnaire items from previous studies is provided. For each item, an example and a list of references are given. EMA typically provides data sets that are rich but also challenging in that they are noisy, and there is often unequal amount of data between participants. After recommendations on how to check the data for compliance, reactivity, and careless responses, methods for statistical analysis on the individual level and on the group level are discussed including special methods for direct comparison of hearing device programs.

Uses of Linguistic Context in Speech Listening: Does Acquired Hearing Loss Lead to Reduced Engagement of Prediction?

Research investigating the complex interplay of cognitive mechanisms involved in speech listening for people with hearing loss has been gaining prominence. In particular, linguistic context allows the use of several cognitive mechanisms that are not well distinguished in hearing science, namely those relating to "postdiction", "integration", and "prediction". We offer the perspective that an unacknowledged impact of hearing loss is the differential use of predictive mechanisms relative to age-matched individuals with normal hearing. As evidence, we first review how degraded auditory input leads to reduced prediction in people with normal hearing, then consider the literature exploring context use in people with acquired postlingual hearing loss. We argue that no research on hearing loss has directly assessed prediction. Because current interventions for hearing do not fully alleviate difficulty in conversation, and avoidance of spoken social interaction may be a mediator between hearing loss and cognitive decline, this perspective could lead to greater understanding of cognitive effects of hearing loss and provide insight regarding new targets for intervention.

Used to Be a Dime, Now It's a Dollar: Revised Speech Perception in Noise Key Word Predictability Revisited 40 Years On.

PURPOSE: Almost 40 years after its development, in this article, we reexamine the relevance and validity of the ubiquitously used Revised Speech Perception in Noise (R-SPiN) sentence corpus. The R-SPiN corpus includes "high-context" and "low-context" sentences and has been widely used in the field of hearing research to examine the benefit derived from semantic context across English-speaking listeners, but research investigating age differences has yielded somewhat inconsistent findings. We assess the appropriateness of the corpus for use today in different English-language cultures (i.e., British and American) as well as for older and younger adults. METHOD: Two hundred forty participants, including older (60-80 years) and younger (19-31 years) adult groups in the the United Kingdom and United States, completed a cloze task consisting of R-SPiN sentences with the final word removed. Cloze, as a measure of predictability, and entropy, as a measure of response uncertainty, were compared between culture and age groups. RESULTS: Most critically, of the 200 "high-context" stimuli, only around half were assessed as highly predictable for older adults (United Kingdom: 109; United States: 107); and fewer still, for younger adults (United Kingdom: 75; United States: 81). We also found dominant responses to these "high-context" stimuli varied between cultures, with U.S. responses being more likely to match the original R-SPiN target. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings highlight the issue of incomplete transferability of corpus items across English-language cultures as well as diminished equivalency for older and younger adults. By identifying relevant items for each population, this work could facilitate the interpretation of inconsistent findings in the literature, particularly relating to age effects.

Previous Mental Load and Incentives Influence Anticipatory Arousal as Indexed by the Baseline Pupil Diameter in a Speech-in-Noise Task.

Listening effort and fatigue are common experiences when conversing in noisy environments. Much research has investigated listening effort in relation to listening demand using the speech-in-noise paradigm. Recent conceptualizations of listening effort postulate that mental fatigue should result in decreased arousal and a reluctance to invest further effort, particularly when the effort is not worthwhile. The aim of the study was to investigate the influence of fatigue on listening effort, in interaction with listening demands and motivation. To induce fatigue 30 adults with normal hearing completed a 40-minute long speech-in-noise task ("load sequence"). Pre- and post-load sequence listening effort was probed in easy and hard listening demands (individually adjusted signal-to-noise ratios); with high and low motivation (manipulated with monetary incentives). Subjective effort, estimated performance, and tendency to quit listening were collected using rating scales. Baseline pupil diameter and mean pupil dilation were recorded as indices of anticipatory arousal and objective effort. Self-reported effort and mean pupil dilation were overall larger during hard SNR as compared to easy SNR. Baseline pupil diameter declined from pre- to post-load sequence, suggesting an overall decrease in arousal. Monetary incentives had no influence on the baseline pupil diameter for the easy SNR condition, but for the hard SNR condition larger incentives led to larger baseline pupil diameter. These results suggest that anticipatory arousal may be influenced by fatigue and motivation effects. Models of listening effort should account for the independent influence of motivation and previous load on anticipatory arousal and effort in distinct parameters.

Fitting a Hearing Aid on the Better Ear, Worse Ear, or Both: Associations of Hearing-aid Fitting Laterality with Outcomes in a Large Sample of US Veterans.

Longitudinal electronic health records from a large sample of new hearing-aid (HA) recipients in the US Veterans Affairs healthcare system were used to evaluate associations of fitting laterality with long-term HA use persistence as measured by battery order records, as well as with short-term HA use and satisfaction as assessed using the International Outcome Inventory for Hearing Aids (IOI-HA), completed within 180 days of HA fitting. The large size of our dataset allowed us to address two aspects of fitting laterality that have not received much attention, namely the degree of hearing asymmetry and the question of which ear to fit if fitting unilaterally. The key findings were that long-term HA use persistence was considerably lower for unilateral fittings for symmetric hearing loss (HL) and for unilateral worse-ear fittings for asymmetric HL, as compared to bilateral and unilateral better-ear fittings. In contrast, no differences across laterality categories were observed for short-term self-reported HA usage. Total IOI-HA score was poorer for unilateral fittings of symmetric HL and for unilateral better-ear fittings compared to bilateral for asymmetric HL. We thus conclude that bilateral fittings yield the best short- and long-term outcomes, and while unilateral and bilateral fittings can result in similar outcomes on some measures, we did not identify any HL configuration for which a bilateral fitting would lead to poorer outcomes. However, if a single HA is to be fitted, then our results indicate that a better-ear fitting has a higher probability of long-term HA use persistence than a worse-ear fitting.

Listening efficiency in adult cochlear-implant users compared with normally-hearing controls at ecologically relevant signal-to-noise ratios.

Introduction: Due to having to work with an impoverished auditory signal, cochlear-implant (CI) users may experience reduced speech intelligibility and/or increased listening effort in real-world listening situations, compared to their normally-hearing (NH) peers. These two challenges to perception may be usefully integrated in a measure of listening efficiency: conceptually, the amount of accuracy achieved for a certain amount of effort expended. Methods: We describe a novel approach to quantifying listening efficiency based on the rate of evidence accumulation toward a correct response in a linear ballistic accumulator (LBA) model of choice decision-making. Estimation of this objective measure within a hierarchical Bayesian framework confers further benefits, including full quantification of uncertainty in parameter estimates. We applied this approach to examine the speech-in-noise performance of a group of 24 CI users (M age: 60.3, range: 20-84 years) and a group of 25 approximately age-matched NH controls (M age: 55.8, range: 20-79 years). In a laboratory experiment, participants listened to reverberant target sentences in cafeteria noise at ecologically relevant signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of +20, +10, and +4 dB SNR. Individual differences in cognition and self-reported listening experiences were also characterised by means of cognitive tests and hearing questionnaires. Results: At the group level, the CI group showed much lower listening efficiency than the NH group, even in favourable acoustic conditions. At the individual level, within the CI group (but not the NH group), higher listening efficiency was associated with better cognition (i.e., working-memory and linguistic-closure) and with more positive self-reported listening experiences, both in the laboratory and in daily life. Discussion: We argue that listening efficiency, measured using the approach described here, is: (i) conceptually well-motivated, in that it is theoretically impervious to differences in how individuals approach the speed-accuracy trade-off that is inherent to all perceptual decision making; and (ii) of practical utility, in that it is sensitive to differences in task demand, and to differences between groups, even when speech intelligibility remains at or near ceiling level. Further research is needed to explore the sensitivity and practical utility of this metric across diverse listening situations.

Combining Multiple Psychophysiological Measures of Listening Effort: Challenges and Recommendations.

About one-third of all recently published studies on listening effort have used at least one physiological measure, providing evidence of the popularity of such measures in listening effort research. However, the specific measures employed, as well as the rationales used to justify their inclusion, vary greatly between studies, leading to a literature that is fragmented and difficult to integrate. A unified approach that assesses multiple psychophysiological measures justified by a single rationale would be preferable because it would advance our understanding of listening effort. However, such an approach comes with a number of challenges, including the need to develop a clear definition of listening effort that links to specific physiological measures, customized equipment that enables the simultaneous assessment of multiple measures, awareness of problems caused by the different timescales on which the measures operate, and statistical approaches that minimize the risk of type-I error inflation. This article discusses in detail the various obstacles for combining multiple physiological measures in listening effort research and provides recommendations on how to overcome them.

Exploring listening-related fatigue in children with and without hearing loss using self-report and parent-proxy measures.

Children with hearing loss appear to experience greater fatigue than children with normal hearing (CNH). Listening-related fatigue is often associated with an increase in effortful listening or difficulty in listening situations. This has been observed in children with bilateral hearing loss (CBHL) and, more recently, in children with unilateral hearing loss (CUHL). Available tools for measuring fatigue in children include general fatigue questionnaires such as the child self-report and parent-proxy versions of the PedsQLTM-Multidimensional Fatigue Scale (MFS) and the PROMIS Fatigue Scale. Recently, the Vanderbilt Fatigue Scale (VFS-C: child self-report; VFS-P: parent-proxy report) was introduced with a specific focus on listening-related fatigue. The aims of this study were to compare fatigue levels experienced by CNH, CUHL and CBHL using both generic and listening-specific fatigue measures and compare outcomes from the child self-report and parent-proxy reports. Eighty children aged 6-16 years (32 CNH, 19 CUHL, 29 CBHL), and ninety-nine parents/guardians (39 parents to CNH, 23 parents to CUHL, 37 parents to CBHL), completed the above fatigue questionnaires online. Kruskal-Wallis H tests were performed to compare fatigue levels between the CNH, CUHL and CBHL. To determine the agreement between parent-proxy and child self-report measures, Bland-Altman 95% limits of agreement were performed. All child self-report fatigue measures indicated that CBHL experience greater fatigue than CNH. Only the listening-specific tool (VFS-C) was sufficiently able to show greater fatigue in CUHL than in CNH. Similarly, all parent-proxy measures of fatigue indicated that CBHL experience significantly greater fatigue than CNH. The VFS-P and the PROMIS Fatigue Parent-Proxy also showed greater fatigue in CUHL than in CNH. Agreement between the parent-proxy and child self-report measures were found within the PedsQL-MFS and the PROMIS Fatigue Scale. Our results suggest that CBHL experience greater levels of daily-life fatigue compared to CNH. CUHL also appear to experience more fatigue than CNH, and listening-specific measures of fatigue may be better able to detect this effect. Further research is needed to understand the bases of fatigue in these populations and to clarify whether fatigue experienced by CBHL and CUHL is comparable in nature and degree.

A qualitative investigation of the hearing and hearing-aid related emotional states experienced by adults with hearing loss.

OBJECTIVE: Despite previous research into the psychosocial impact of hearing loss, little detail is known regarding the hearing and hearing-aid-related emotional states experienced by adults with hearing loss in everyday life, and how they occur. DESIGN: Individual remote semi-structured interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and qualitatively analysed with reflexive and inductive thematic analysis. STUDY SAMPLE: Seventeen participants (9 female) with hearing loss (age range 44-74 years) participated. Ten used bilateral hearing aids, four unilateral and three used no hearing aids at the time of interviews. RESULTS: The four main themes which emerged from the data were: identity and self-image, autonomy and control, personality and dominant emotional states and situational cost/benefit analysis with respect to use of hearing aids. CONCLUSIONS: This study goes beyond previous literature by providing a more detailed insight into emotions related to hearing and hearing-aids in adults. Hearing loss causes a multitude of negative emotions, while hearing aids generally reduce negative emotions and allow for more positive emotions. However, factors such as lifestyle, personality, situational control, the relationship with those in conversation and the attribution of blame are key to individual emotional experience. Clinical implications include the important role of social relationships in assessment and counselling.

Conversation success in one-to-one and group conversation: a group concept mapping study of adults with normal and impaired hearing.

OBJECTIVE: The concept of conversation success is undefined, although prior work has variously related it to accurate exchange of information, alignment between interlocutors, and good management of misunderstandings. This study aimed (1) to identify factors of conversation success and (2) to explore the importance of these factors in one-to-one versus group conversations. DESIGN: Group concept mapping method was applied. Participants responded to two brainstorming prompts ("What does 'successful conversation' look like?" and "Think about a successful conversation you have taken part in. What aspects of that conversation contributed to its success?"). The resulting statements were sorted into related clusters and rated in importance for one-to-one and group conversation. STUDY SAMPLE: Thirty-five adults with normal and impaired hearing. RESULTS: Seven clusters were identified: (1) Being able to listen easily; (2) Being spoken to in a helpful way; (3) Being engaged and accepted; (4) Sharing information as desired; (5) Perceiving flowing and balanced interaction; (6) Feeling positive emotions; (7) Not having to engage coping mechanisms. Three clusters (1, 2, and 4) were more important in group than in one-to-one conversation. There were no differences by hearing group. CONCLUSIONS: These findings emphasise that conversation success is a multifaceted concept.

Dementia and hearing-aid use: a two-way street.

OBJECTIVES: Hearing-aid use may reduce risk of dementia, but cognitive impairment makes use more challenging. An observed association between reduced hearing-aid use and incident dementia could reflect either or both of these causal paths. The objective was to examine the effects of each path while minimising contamination between paths. METHODS: Health records data from 380,794 Veterans who obtained hearing aids from the US Veterans Affairs healthcare system were analysed. Analysis 1 (n = 72,180) used multivariable logistic regression to model the likelihood of incident dementia 3.5-5 years post hearing-aid fitting for patients free of dementia and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Analysis 2 (n = 272,748) modelled the likelihood of being a persistent hearing-aid user at 3 years 2 months after fitting, contrasting subgroups by level of cognitive function at the time of fitting. Analysis time windows were optimized relative to dataset constraints. Models were controlled for available relevant predictors. RESULTS: The adjusted OR for incident dementia was 0.73 (95% CI 0.66-0.81) for persistent (versus non-persistent) hearing-aid users. The adjusted OR for hearing-aid use persistence was 0.46 (95% CI 0.43-0.48) in those with pre-existing dementia (versus those remaining free of MCI and dementia). CONCLUSION: Substantial independent associations are observed in both directions, suggesting that hearing-aid use decreases risk of dementia and that better cognitive function predisposes towards persistent use. Research studying protective effects of hearing-aid use against dementia needs to account for cognitive status. Clinically, hearing devices and hearing care processes must be accessible and usable for all, regardless of their cognitive status.

Dataset of British English speech recordings for psychoacoustics and speech processing research: The clarity speech corpus.

This paper presents the Clarity Speech Corpus, a publicly available, forty speaker British English speech dataset. The corpus was created for the purpose of running listening tests to gauge speech intelligibility and quality in the Clarity Project, which has the goal of advancing speech signal processing by hearing aids through a series of challenges. The dataset is suitable for machine learning and other uses in speech and hearing technology, acoustics and psychoacoustics. The data comprises recordings of approximately 10,000 sentences drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC) with suitable length, words and grammatical construction for speech intelligibility testing. The collection process involved the selection of a subset of BNC sentences, the recording of these produced by 40 British English speakers, and the processing of these recordings to create individual sentence recordings with associated transcripts and metadata.

Smartphone App-Based Noncontact Ecological Momentary Assessment With Experienced and Naïve Older Participants: Feasibility Study.

BACKGROUND: Smartphone app-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) without face-to-face contact between researcher and participant (app-based noncontact EMA) potentially provides a valuable data collection tool when geographic, time, and situational factors (eg, COVID-19 restrictions) place constraints on in-person research. Nevertheless, little is known about the feasibility of this method, particularly in older and naïve EMA participants. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to assess the feasibility of app-based noncontact EMA as a function of previous EMA experience, by recruiting and comparing a group of participants who had never participated in EMA before against a group of participants who had been part of an earlier in-person EMA study, and age, by recruiting middle-aged to older adults. METHODS: Overall, 151 potential participants were invited via email; 46.4% (70/151) enrolled in the study by completing the baseline questionnaire set and were emailed instructions for the EMA phase. Of these participants, 67% (47/70) downloaded an EMA app and ran the survey sequence for 1 week. In total, 5 daytime surveys and 1 evening survey, each day, assessed participants' listening environment, social activity, and conversational engagement. A semistructured exit telephone interview probed the acceptability of the method. As markers of feasibility, we assessed the enrollment rate, study completion rate, reason for noncompletion, EMA survey response rate, and likelihood of reporting an issue with survey alerts and requested assistance from researchers, family, or friends. RESULTS: Enrollment rates among invitees (63.3% vs 38.2%; P=.004) and completion rates among enrollees (83.9% vs 53.8%; P<.001) were higher in the experienced than in the naïve EMA group. On average, experienced participants responded to 64.1% (SD 30.2%) of the daytime EMA surveys, and naïve participants responded to 54.3% (SD 29.5%) of the daytime EMA surveys (P=.27). Among participants who retrospectively reported issues with survey alerts, only 19% (3/16) requested researcher assistance during data collection. Older participants were more likely to report not being alerted to EMA surveys (P=.008), but age was unrelated to all other markers of feasibility. Post hoc analyses of the effect of the phone operating system on markers of feasibility revealed that response rates were higher among iOS users (mean 74.8%, SD 20.25%) than among Android users (mean 48.5%, SD 31.35%; P=.002). CONCLUSIONS: Smartphone app-based noncontact EMA appears to be feasible, although participants with previous EMA experience, younger participants, and iOS users performed better on certain markers of feasibility. Measures to increase feasibility may include extensive testing of the app with different phone types, encouraging participants to seek timely assistance for any issues experienced, and recruiting participants who have some previous EMA experience where possible. The limitations of this study include participants' varying levels of existing relationship with the researcher and the implications of collecting data during the COVID-19 social restrictions.

Changes in Orientation Behavior due to Extended High-Frequency (5 to 10 kHz) Spatial Cues.

OBJECTIVES: Current hearing aids have a limited bandwidth, which limits the intelligibility and quality of their output, and inhibits their uptake. Recent advances in signal processing, as well as novel methods of transduction, allow for a greater useable frequency range. Previous studies have shown a benefit for this extended bandwidth in consonant recognition, talker-sex identification, and separating sound sources. To explore whether there would be any direct spatial benefits to extending bandwidth, we used a dynamic localization method in a realistic situation. DESIGN: Twenty-eight adult participants with minimal hearing loss reoriented themselves as quickly and accurately as comfortable to a new, off-axis near-field talker continuing a story in a background of far-field talkers of the same overall level in a simulated large room with common building materials. All stimuli were low-pass filtered at either 5 or 10 kHz on each trial. To further simulate current hearing aids, participants wore microphones above the pinnae and insert earphones adjusted to provide a linear, zero-gain response. RESULTS: Each individual trajectory was recorded with infra-red motion-tracking and analyzed for accuracy, duration, start time, peak velocity, peak velocity time, complexity, reversals, and misorientations. Results across listeners showed a significant increase in peak velocity and significant decrease in start and peak velocity time with greater (10 kHz) bandwidth. CONCLUSIONS: These earlier, swifter orientations demonstrate spatial benefits beyond static localization accuracy in plausible conditions; extended bandwidth without pinna cues provided more salient cues in a realistic mixture of talkers.

The effect of stimulus duration on preferences for gain adjustments when listening to speech.

OBJECTIVES: In the personalisation of hearing-aid fittings, gain is often adjusted to suit patient preferences using live speech. When using brief sentences as stimuli, the minimum gain adjustments necessary to elicit consistent preferences ("preference thresholds") were previously found to be much greater than typical adjustments in current practice. The current study examined the role of duration on preference thresholds. DESIGN: Participants heard 2, 4 and 6-s segments of a continuous monologue presented successively in pairs. The first segment of each pair was presented at each individual's real-ear or prescribed gain. The second segment was presented with a ±0-12 dB gain adjustment in one of three frequency bands. Participants judged whether the second was "better", "worse" or "no different" from the first. STUDY SAMPLE: Twenty-nine adults, all with hearing-aid experience. RESULTS: The minimum gain adjustments needed to elicit "better" or "worse" judgments decreased with increasing duration for most adjustments. Inter-participant agreement and intra-participant reliability increased with increasing duration up to 4 s, then remained stable. CONCLUSIONS: Providing longer stimuli improves the likelihood of patients providing reliable judgments of hearing-aid gain adjustments, but the effect is limited, and alternative fitting methods may be more viable for effective hearing-aid personalisation.

Hearing Aids Reduce Daily-Life Fatigue and Increase Social Activity: A Longitudinal Study.

People with hearing loss experience fatigue, and it is unknown whether this is alleviated by treatment with hearing aids. The objective of this study was to address this issue and to investigate the possible concomitant effect of hearing-aid fitting on activity levels. An intervention group (n = 53) who were due to be fitted with their first-ever hearing aid(s) and a control group (n = 53) who had hearing loss but no change in hearing aid status-completed a battery of self-report outcome measures four times: once before fitting, and at 2 weeks, 3 months, and 6 months post fitting. Self-report outcome measures at each assessment captured fatigue, listening effort, hearing handicap, auditory lifestyle, social participation restrictions, and work, social and physical activity levels. Hearing-aid fitting led to a significant reduction in listening-related fatigue, but not general fatigue, in the intervention group compared to the control group. Additionally, social activity level increased and social participation restriction decreased significantly after hearing aid fitting in the intervention group compared to the control group. No significant interaction was found between working status and change in listening-related fatigue score. This study is the first to make a longitudinal measurement of fatigue before and after first-ever hearing aid fitting and to identify an increase in social activity level after hearing aid fitting. These findings have important implications for future research and the clinical practice of hearing aid fitting.

Electronic Health Records As a Platform for Audiological Research: Data Validity, Patient Characteristics, and Hearing-Aid Use Persistence Among 731,213 U.S. Veterans.

OBJECTIVES: This article presents a summary of audiological, general health, and hearing aid (HA) outcome data in a large sample of U.S. Veterans receiving HAs. The current article also provides the foundation for a series of papers that will explore relationships between a wide range of factors and HA outcomes. DESIGN: The patient sample is all (n = 731,213) patients for whom HAs were ordered between April 2012 and October 2014 through the U.S. Veterans Health Administration Remote Order Entry System. For these patients, Veterans Affairs electronic health records (EHRs) stored in various databases provided data on demographics, received diagnostic and procedure codes (2007 to 2017), audiometry, self-reported outcomes up to 6 months postfitting, and HA battery orders (to 2017). Data cleaning and preparation was carried out and is discussed with reference to insights that provide potential value to other researchers pursuing similar studies. HA battery order data over time was used to derive a measure of long-term HA use persistence. Descriptive statistics were used to characterize the sample, comparative analyses against other data supported basic validity assessment, and bivariate analyses probed novel associations between patient characteristics and HA use persistence at 2 years postfitting. RESULTS: Following extensive cleaning and data preparation, the data show plausible characteristics on diverse metrics and exhibit adequate validity based on comparisons with other published data. Further, rates of HA use persistence are favorable when compared against therapy persistence data for other major chronic conditions. The data also show that the presence of certain comorbid conditions (Parkinson's disease, diabetes, arthritis, and visual impairment) are associated with significantly lower HA use persistence, as are prior inpatient admissions (especially among new HA recipients), and that increasing levels of multimorbidity, in general, are associated with decreasing HA use persistence. This is all despite the fact that deriving relevant audiological care-process variables from the available records was not straightforward, especially concerning the definition of the date of HA fitting, and the use of battery ordering data to determine long-term HA use persistence. CONCLUSIONS: We have shown that utilizing EHRs in audiology has the potential to provide novel insights into clinical practice patterns, audiologic outcomes, and relations between factors pertaining to hearing and to other health conditions in clinical populations, despite the potential pitfalls regarding the lack of control over the variables available and limitations on how the data are entered. We thus conclude that research using EHRs has the potential to be an integral supplement to population-based and epidemiologic research in the field of audiology.

A Measure of Long-Term Hearing Aid Use Persistence Based on Battery Reordering Data.

OBJECTIVE: We describe the construction of a hearing aid long-term use persistence measure based on battery reorder data. The measure is derived from the notion that hearing aid users keep using their devices for some time after placing a battery order. DESIGN: A hearing aid user is defined as persistent at time T if they placed a battery order within a time span W preceding T. We characterize and validate this measure using electronic health records from a large sample of US Veterans. RESULTS: We describe how to choose parameters T and W for calculating persistence rates in the patient sample. For validation, the associations of persistence with: (1) the duration over which users received outpatient hearing aid care; (2) self-reported hearing aid use shortly after fitting; and (3) patient age and hearing loss are investigated. In all cases, plausible dependencies are observed. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that our persistence measure is viable and hope this will motivate its use in similar studies.