Is Your Hearing Fit for Purpose?

Did you know certain jobs or occupations require you to take a hearing test?

For example, state police officers may be required to have a hearing check, to make sure they can perform their duties when under the duress of a noisy environment. This makes sense when you think about it, because in a nosy night club or in a crowd, the officer needs to hear clearly what people are saying so that misunderstandings don’t occur.

Interestingly, police officers take a specific test called the Hearing in Noise Test or HINT. This specifically tests those with mild hearing loss whose main problems are understanding speech in a noisy situation. Indeed, HINT is also used to help fine tune hearing aids for those already diagnosed with listening issues.

Why Use HINT?

If your hearing loss is subtle, such as impairment only under a certain combination of circumstances, then it’s possible that a conventional hearing test may miss the signs. This is where HINT comes in. It effectively compares your hearing to itself, by testing your ability to comprehend speech in a quiet and a noisy environment. By comparing the “before and after” as it were, the audiologist can then draw conclusions about your hearing fitness.

How does HINT work?

The audiologist will ask you to listen to and repeat sentences spoken in a quiet environment.  You will then to do the same thing in a noisy environment with the speaker in different positions around you. This also checks both ears to see if one is weaker than the other.

During a HINT test you can expect someone to speak directly in front of you, standing to your right hand side and to the left. The speaker starts out softly, and gets louder depending on your hearing ability. Then the level of background noise is changed.

The Test Results

The audiologist looks at the speech volumes you heard correctly and converts this into a signal-to-noise ratio, which is cross referenced with normal values for people with normal hearing.

From this, the audiologist can guide you as to any subtle changes in your hearing health. The advantage of the HINT is that is can detect mild changes in hearing, which could impact your ability to understand and interpret speech. If you’ve had a hearing test which came back normal and yet you’re still convinced you have a problem, then a HINT could be the next step.

HINT can pick up the hearing equivalent of an intermittent problem, in that the issue only arises under a certain combination of circumstances, such as a soft voice in a noisy background.  Indeed, its other use is to help the audiologist fine tune your hearing device, or even select a device which is better suited to your needs.