Summary:

In this study we asked 24 hearing instrument wearers to compare the performance of Passport hearing instruments with smartFocus enabled to the same hearing instruments without the smartFocus feature. There were 4 key findings from this study:

• Given the choice of a fully automatic Passport HI and one with smartFocus enabled, 22 out of 24 subjects preferred smartFocus.
• The top three reasons given for these choices were:
       - better clarity
       - comfort in noise and,
       - flexibility and control.
• Hearing instruments with smartFocus were shown to provide significantly more benefit and significantly reduced disability than the same instruments without smartFocus.
• Setting the smartFocus control to maximum clarity yields a significant improvement for speech perception in noise over the neutral setting and likely over a Gold Standard fitting.