Assistive Listening Knowledge Base
  • Paper (journal article analysing an industry consumer survey)

MarkeTrak 10 (MT10) Survey Results Demonstrate High Satisfaction with and Benefits from Hearing Aids

From https://assistivelisteningknowledgebase.org/evidence/picou-2020/ · record checked 13 October 2026

  • Picou EM
  • Seminars in Hearing 41(1):21-36 (Thieme)

Trade body (MarkeTrak is commissioned by the Hearing Industries Association, the US hearing aid industry's association; the author, of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, declares research funding from Sonova, GN ReSound and Signia as well as the National Institutes of Health)

Summary

Results from the 2018 MarkeTrak 10 survey of US adults with hearing loss, including which features their hearing aids have and how many own smartphones.

Key findings

  • Figure 7 compares satisfaction by feature ownership without printing telecoil-group counts. The 702-person base in Current Usage and Table 1 describes recent owners and should not be assigned as a verified denominator to the Figure 7 comparison.
  • Of hearing aid owners who got their aids in the past five years (n=702), 20% said their hearing aids have a telecoil, 54% said they do not and 26% were not sure.
  • Among all respondents with hearing loss, 86% have a cell phone and 78% of those phones are smartphones; smartphone ownership was above 80% for respondents younger than 75.
  • 54% of owners said their hearing aids have some wireless capability, but only 13% could stream directly from an iPhone; the author notes Android streaming was not yet available at the time of the survey.
  • Owners with a telecoil, directional microphones, a smartphone app, Bluetooth devices or wireless hearing aids reported higher satisfaction than owners without those features.
  • The author links continued difficulty on cell phones partly to low telecoil use and low streaming use, and finds about 1 in 5 owners unsure whether their aids have less visible features.
  • The companion methods article cited as reference 43 (Powers and Rogin, MarkeTrak 10: History and Methodology, DOI 10.1055/s-0040-1701241) identifies the Hearing Industries Association as the organisation behind the survey series and AZ Marketing Research as its research collaborator. In Picou, Current Usage limits the feature results to owners who acquired aids within five years, and Table 1 gives this group as 702.
  • The Technology section reports cellphone ownership and smartphone shares among respondents with hearing loss, but does not state the denominator for those phone questions; the 702-person base belongs to recent hearing-aid owners, not to the phone figures.

Limits

Self-reported: many owners did not know their aids' features, so the telecoil figure measures awareness rather than what is fitted. The survey does not ask about venue assistive listening systems or hearing loops. Data were collected in 2018, before Auracast and before over-the-counter hearing aids. MarkeTrak 10 sent a screening survey to over 20,000 US households balanced to census characteristics (3,132 people with hearing loss answered the detailed part, 969 of them hearing aid owners); its methods are described in a companion article by HIA authors.

Read the original

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7010487

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Cited in

Cite this source

Picou EM. MarkeTrak 10 (MT10) Survey Results Demonstrate High Satisfaction with and Benefits from Hearing Aids. Seminars in Hearing 41(1):21-36 (Thieme). 10 February 2020. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7010487/ (accessed 13 October 2026).

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