# The Apple Hearing Study Just Made the Case AirPods Have Been Trying to Make for Years

Source: https://idevice.com/apple-hearing-study-airpods-case-moq7jeqp
Published: 2026-05-03

> Apple's research with the University of Michigan, run across 160,000 U.S. participants since 2019, found that 16% of people who tested within the WHO normal-hearing range still rated their own hearing as fair or poor, and worse self-reported hearing correlated with slower walking speed in adults over 60. AirPods Pro 2 and Pro 3 run continuous hearing tests and FDA-cleared hearing-aid mode in real environments, which is the kind of measurement a clinical booth test cannot do.

[16% of people with "clinically normal hearing" still rate their own hearing as fair or poor](https://9to5mac.com/2026/05/01/apple-shares-new-airpods-findings-from-hearing-study/). Their audiologist would tell them they're fine. Their daily life says otherwise.

That figure comes from the Apple Hearing Study, [conducted with the University of Michigan across more than 160,000 U.S. participants](https://sph.umich.edu/applehearingstudy/) since 2019. The threshold clinical audiology uses — a pure tone average of 25 dB or below — passes these people as healthy. [Among nearly 85,000 participants who tested in that "normal" range, 16% rated their hearing as fair or poor anyway](https://sph.umich.edu/applehearingstudy/study-updates/assess-and-assist-features.html). [Worse self-reported hearing also correlates with slower walking speed in adults over 60](https://sph.umich.edu/applehearingstudy/study-updates/assess-and-assist-features.html), pulled from over 57,000 participants whose iPhones passively logged how fast they walked. That ties hearing decline to mobility and fall risk in a way a standard booth test never would.

Clinical hearing assessments are snapshots in time. You sit in a quiet room, press a button when you hear a tone, and leave with a number. That number cannot capture how hearing degrades in noise, over time, across the actual environments where people live. The AirPods hearing features — the Hearing Test on AirPods Pro 2 and Pro 3, the Hearing Aid mode that turns the earbuds into FDA-cleared hearing assistance — run continuously in the environments the booth test cannot reach.

The study's sample is self-selected. These are Apple users who opted into research, which means it skews toward people already paying attention to their health. Even with that bias, one in six people passing a clinical hearing screen still struggles in everyday environments. That is a real measurement problem hiding inside a metric the medical industry has accepted as the gold standard for decades.

AirPods Pro already had FDA clearance as a hearing aid. The Hearing Study just gave Apple something harder to argue with: evidence that the standard clinical test misses one in six people who actually need help.

## Sources

- [Apple shares new AirPods findings from Hearing Study](https://9to5mac.com/2026/05/01/apple-shares-new-airpods-findings-from-hearing-study/) (9to5Mac)