This may not apply if your hearing loss was sudden, but many people get hearing aids only after years of decline. Your brain adapts to what it has available and you learn to hear as best you can with the limited stimulus. When you finally get hearing aids, it feels like your ears have been unblocked.
When it comes to interpreting speech though, especially in noisy circumstances, you have to give it time. Your brain isn't used to using the extra stimulus to interpret speech. In fact, it may have gotten used to hearing loss filtering out background noise and you may initially find all the stimulus makes it harder to interpret speech because of all the background noise you now hear that you previously didn't.
If you don't have patience and start immediately futzing with volume all the time, you never give your brain a chance to adapt, and will be very dissatisfied.
When programmed properly, I find my hearing aids on their various speech modes to sound distinctly artificial and processed. I imagine it would be jarring to the uninitiated. Like a good speech codec or vocoder. It's unlike anything else.
But having grown up with DSP hearing aids doing this all my life, I find speech coming through them very comprehensible, often shockingly so compared to my normal hearing -- even with other amplification like regular headphones. I do dislike my hearing aids for music, though, even on the normal or music settings.
I have many ideas about how the industry can be improved, especially with the use of a smart phone app and user interactions.
Not only is it plausible, but would make the clinicians (fitter) job easier and lead to far more hearing aid sales.
Based on my observations of my father's struggles with various hearing aids, hearing aid smartphone apps are just as terrible as any other apps developed by hardware manufacturers. Don't expect the "clinicians" to help with this aspect either, because they were trained on a previous version of a different app and how could they be expected to figure out the apps that are used now?
then there's also additional complications like types of hearing loss impacting calibration - some people react very negatively to higher (or lower) frequencies than others do, to the point facial stimulation can happen, and some people just have a frankly tricky profile that requires a trained audiologist on hand to work with them through several sessions, if not outright yearly on top of that, since the nerves and brain output can change by itself.
(source: have a cochlear implant, been doing the described experience since I was ~ 3yrs old.)
I've had audiograms taken on moderate and bad days, and the difference in frequency response was significant (up to 30dBA difference across only the lower frequency bands).
On TVs, they call those buttons volume buttons, it is revolutionary.
And just like the TV remote they increase all sounds - good (speech) and bad (music and explosions).
The issue is not just "is it loud enough" but rather, "can you understand what you want to hear when you want to hear it?"
imagine yourself at a busy restaurant. you want to hear your spouses speach better, and the wait staff- but turning their speech up also turns up the people you do not want to hear.
how do you fix that?
noise reduction, speech enhancement, directional microphones are just some of the tools a hearing aid uses.
But ultimately what needs to happen is your brain works harder at comprehending what you want to hear(yes, it is work, and like all work people do not want to do it).
So they think...hmmm, I will just pay $xxxx.xx and I wont have to work anymore.
Whether like me, you never got the hang of a retainer after braces - or went off braces too soon, in my case - there has been a number of companies trying to get costs down and make the process less expensive and onerous.
Yet, talking to my regular dentist, who has used Invisalign with patients before, it's not the fact that there are more competitors in the field, essentially putting pressure on the DMD's and others to up their game, it's that after the initial consult, the entire process is (largely) unsupervised.
If you don't fit (or tune) something like this properly, it doesn't work.
Also a problem if you're not a native speaker. I am fluent in English and have been able to watch movies without subtitles for 20 years at least, probably more.
But put me in a noisy bar and my error correction suffers a lot. Suddenly it's hard to follow a conversation that in my native language would be effortless.
The worst situation is listening to a loud video on bad speakers. Doesn't matter how much you crank the volume, people are hard to understand because the brain's error correction isn't good enough. Use a good speaker and turn down the volume, suddenly it's perfect.
This is of course a huge oversimplification, and aiming for it is probably what the industry is doing.
but your idea is great too. if you can't hear one frequency, let's amplify all frequencies till the one you need gets loud enough, and go deaf to the other ones in a year. when you get old and need a hearing aid, you should stick with your method.
What if, instead, the calibration process worked constantly? Give the user a button to press when they don't hear something well, and another when they do. Let them have this for a month, let them try it in their kitchen, their bedroom, the local shop or bar, outdoors. Run some reinforcement learning algorithm to optimize for getting more "good" presses and fewer "bad" ones. Optionally, adapt separately to each environment.
Is there a "smart" hearing aid calibrator that works like this? If not, but you think it's plausible, I'm interested in working on it.