This is not what the research shows. It shows that the AirPod Pros work similarly to premium hearing aids when the noise is coming from the lateral side, but not the front side. There were not significant differences in quiet environments, but there were in noisy environments. People who are hard of hearing need the most assistance in noisy environments.

Second of all, they looked at people who had bilateral sensorineural hearing loss in the mild-to-moderate range. If I know anything about the audiology world, it's that nothing ever happens that way in real life and tons of people have different hearing levels in their ears. They didn't even tell us where the hearing loss occurred. Was it in the high pitches or the low pitches? Did all the patients experience hearing loss in the same frequencies?

What I don't understand about this study is how they got the AirPods to pick up noise in the room that did not come from the phone. I understand how they did it with hearing aids because hearing aids have microphones that pick up stuff from the environment, which then gets amplified and converted into sound in someone's ear.

How did they program the Airpods to do that? Because I thought the point of earphones was to block out the sound around you and pump in the sound from the phone. When you speak into a microphone on the airpods, it goes to someone else's hearing set. So how did they reroute it to the Airpods own hearing set? It was not explained in the methods. EDIT: It's apparently a built in feature with the iphone and Airpods Pro called "Headphone Accommodations."