The Aging Hand and the Ergonomics of Hearing Aid Controls
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Brief Objectives: The authors investigated the effects of hand function and aging on the ability to manipulate different hearing instrument controls. Over the past quarter century, hearing aids and hearing aid controls have become increasingly miniaturized. It is important to investigate the aging hand and hearing aid ergonomics because most hearing aid wearers are adults aged 65 years and above, who may have difficulty handling these devices. Design: In Experiment 1, the effect of age on the ability to manipulate two different open-fit behind-the-ear style hearing aids was investigated by comparing the performance of 20 younger (18–25 years of age), 20 young–old (60–70 years of age), and 20 older adults (71–80 years of age). In Experiment 2, ability to manipulate 11 different hearing instrument controls was investigated in 28 older adults who self-reported having arthritis in their hand, wrist, or finger and 28 older adults who did not report arthritis. For both experiments, the relationship between performance on the measures of ability to manipulate the devices and performance on a battery of tests to assess hand function was investigated. Results: In Experiment 1, age-related differences in performance were observed in all the tasks assessing hand function and in the tasks assessing ability to manipulate a hearing aid. In Experiment 2, although minimal differences were observed between the two groups, significant differences were observed depending on the type of hearing instrument control. Performance on several of the objective tests of hand function was associated with the ability to manipulate hearing instruments. Conclusions: The overall pattern of findings suggest that haptic (touch) sensitivity in the fingertips and manual dexterity, as well as disability, pain, and joint stiffness of the hand, all contribute to the successful operation of a hearing instrument. However, although aging is associated with declining hand function and co-occurring declines in ability to manipulate a hearing instrument, for the sample of individuals in this study, including those who self-reported having arthritis, only minimal declines were observed. Motivated by the increased miniaturization of hearing instrument controls over the past quarter century, the effects of hand function and aging on the ability to manipulate different hearing instrument controls were investigated in two experiments. In both experiments, participants completed a battery of subjective and objective tests of hand function and then completed tasks assessing the ability to manipulate different hearing instrument controls. The overall pattern of findings suggest that haptic (touch) sensitivity in the fingertips and manual dexterity, as well as disability, pain, and joint stiffness of the hand all contribute to the successful operation of a hearing instrument.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".