Assistive Listening Knowledge Base
  • Peer-reviewed laboratory study

Smartphone-bundled earphones as personal sound amplification products in adults with sensorineural hearing loss

From https://assistivelisteningknowledgebase.org/evidence/lin-2022-smartphone-earphones/ · record checked 13 October 2026

  • Lin HYH, Lai HS, Huang CY, Chen CH, Wu SL, Chu YC, Chen YF, Lai YH, Cheng YF
  • iScience 25(12):105436 (Cell Press)

Independent (Taiwan National Science and Technology Council grants and Veterans General Hospitals and University System of Taiwan Joint Research Program; authors declare no competing interests)

Summary

A laboratory comparison of hearing aids and smartphone earphones in 21 adults with mild to moderate hearing loss and no hearing-aid experience.

Key findings

  • Tested AirPods 2 and AirPods Pro with an iPhone XS Max running iOS 13.0 against premium Oticon Opn 1 and basic Bernafon MD1 hearing aids, using Mandarin sentences.
  • AirPods Pro and the hearing aids did not differ significantly in quiet. With speech and noise both in front, the premium aid gave a 2.1 dB better speech-in-noise threshold than AirPods Pro; with noise from the side, that difference was not significant.
  • The authors frame the earphones as personal sound amplification products and discuss Live Listen. This is evidence about an earphone listening path, not reception of a venue broadcast.
  • The MHINT results section and Table 4 report better speech reception thresholds with AirPods Pro than unaided in quiet (p < 0.05), but no statistically significant improvement over unaided listening with noise from the front (p = 0.25) or left (p = 0.14). These comparisons are distinct from the device-to-device comparisons in Table 5.

Limits

Small, single-blind laboratory study, with first-fit hearing-aid settings rather than real-ear verification. It predates Apple's Hearing Aid feature and tests neither Auracast nor venue Wi-Fi. Results cannot establish equivalence across environments or apply to other earbud models.

Read the original

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9801236

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Cited in

Cite this source

Lin HYH, Lai HS, Huang CY, Chen CH, Wu SL, Chu YC, Chen YF, Lai YH, Cheng YF. Smartphone-bundled earphones as personal sound amplification products in adults with sensorineural hearing loss. iScience 25(12):105436 (Cell Press). 15 November 2022. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9801236/ (accessed 13 October 2026).

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