If you’ve ever had a hearing test, you know the drill. You sit in a small, soundproof booth. You put on heavy headphones. You raise your hand when you hear a beep.

It’s quiet. Ideally, perfectly quiet.

And that is exactly the problem.

Because unless you plan to spend the rest of your life sitting in a soundproof booth, that test environment looks nothing like your real life.

The Ecological Validity Gap

In clinical audiology, we talk about “Ecological Validity”—a fancy term for “does this test actually predict real-world performance?”

Traditional booth testing has low ecological validity. It tells us perfectly how your ears work in silence. It tells us very little about how your ears work when:

  • The refrigerator is humming.
  • Your hardwood floors are echoing.
  • Three people are talking at once at Sunday dinner.

This is why so many people get hearing aids that sound “great in the clinic” but “terrible at home.” The device was calibrated for a world that doesn’t exist.

The Solution: In-Situ Calibration

This is why Ear to Ear Audiology practices In-Situ (“In Place”) Audiometry.

Instead of putting you in a booth, we test you in your living room. Instead of headphones, we play the test sounds through the hearing aids themselves while they are in your ears.

This accounts for two critical things a booth test ignores:

  1. The Acoustics of Your Ear Canal: Every ear canal shape changes sound differently. Headphones bypass this; hearing aids don’t.
  2. The Acoustics of Your Environment: By calibrating the aids in your home, we can measure exactly how background noise interacts with speech in your specific space.

The “Restaurant Test”

We take it a step further. Because we are mobile, we can simulate—or even visit—challenging environments. We don’t just ask “how does that sound?” We measure it. We adjust the noise-cancellation algorithms in real-time to suppress the specific frequency of your AC unit or the ambient traffic noise of your street.

The Research

The shift to in-situ audiometry is supported by clinical research. A seminal paper by Keidser et al. (2020) in Ear and Hearing defines “Ecological Validity” as the critical missing link in traditional audiology, arguing that laboratory findings often fail to reflect real-life function.

Read the research on Ecological Validity

Stop Guessing

You don’t live in a booth. Don’t test in one.

Experience the difference of Precision In-Home Care. Book your consultation today.