What is your Hearing Number?
A simple 5-minute hearing screening to find your Hearing Number and track your hearing health.
Hearing Help & Information
iHEARtest is a free screening tool from OTCHealth. OTCHealth also sells hearing devices in the Shop tab, that's how we pay for the app.
iHEARtest is a hearing screening tool, not a diagnostic test. For a complete evaluation, consult a licensed hearing professional.
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Before you begin
Please confirm the following:
Who are you testing today?
Headphone setup
Which headphones are you using? This helps us calibrate the test for your gear.
Calibrate your volume
We're going to play two sounds and ask you to set your iPhone volume so they're equally loud. This makes your Hearing Number trustworthy across devices and headphones.
Which side did you hear it on?
We'll play a short tone to one ear. Tap the side you heard it on. This catches reversed headphone cables before the test.
Checking your environment
Measuring background noise...
Phone microphones are approximate. Readings are estimates only.
A quick 10-question check-in
Your test result tells us about your tone-hearing threshold. These 10 questions tell us how your hearing affects your daily life. We'll compare the two on your results page.
Your Results
What does my Hearing Number mean?
Your Hearing Number measures how well you hear across everyday speech frequencies (500-4000 Hz). Lower is better, like a golf score.
Normal (0-25): hearing is in the typical range for healthy adults. Mild (26-39): some sounds are harder to catch, especially in background noise. Moderate (40-55): speech often sounds muffled, especially high-pitched consonants. Severe or Profound (56+): significant loss, an audiologist evaluation is recommended.
This is a screening tool, not a clinical diagnosis.
Hearing Profile
Recommended for you
iHEARtest is a hearing screening tool, not a diagnostic test. For a complete hearing evaluation, consult a licensed hearing professional.
Talk to a hearing professional
Your screening result is outside the range where over-the-counter devices are the right starting point. A licensed audiologist can evaluate you in person and recommend a treatment plan.
iHEARtest is a screening tool, not a diagnostic test. A licensed audiologist's in-person evaluation is the standard of care for hearing loss in this range.
Your Hearing Results
Track how your hearing changes over time.
Test History
Achievements
Hearing health, decoded
Plain-language hearing-health articles. See for our medical advisors, methodology, and FDA regulatory status.
Buyer's Guides
View all →Hearing Tools
Hearing Health Topics
All articles →Your Household
Track hearing for everyone in the family.
All results stay on this device. Nothing is shared without your permission.
Caregiver Dashboard
Keep an eye on hearing for the people you care for. Tap a person to see their results.
Add Family Member
Shop OTCHealth
OTC hearing care sold by OTCHealth. Buying through this Shop tab is what funds the free iHEARtest screening.
TReO Personal Sound Amplifier (PSAP)
For normal-hearing listeners in difficult environments (lectures, birdwatching, distant TV). NOT a hearing aid. Not intended to compensate for hearing loss and not FDA-regulated as a medical device.
iHEAR Matrix Bluetooth (OTC Hearing Aid)
Pre-order: ships July 2026. Bluetooth streaming OTC hearing aid for adults with perceived mild-to-moderate hearing loss.
HearingAssist by OTCHealth
FDA-regulated OTC hearing aids for adults with perceived mild-to-moderate hearing loss. The full HearingAssist line, available to ship now.
OTCHealth CareNow
Telehealth visits with licensed hearing professionals.
OTCHealth SaveRx
Free Rx discount card. Save up to 80%.
Hear what hearing loss sounds like
Put on headphones. Pick a hearing loss preset, custom audiogram, or load your own test result. Then play sounds and toggle the simulation on or off to compare.
1. Choose hearing loss profile
2. Choose audio source
3. Listen and compare
Hear something familiar? OTC hearing aids can help mild-to-moderate hearing loss. FDA-cleared. HSA/FSA eligible.
Decibel Meter
Measure how loud your environment is. Sustained noise above 85 dB can damage hearing.
Tinnitus Masking Sounds
Pick a sound to play. All sounds are synthesized on-device. Every loop is mathematically seamless, with no clicks at the loop point.
Sound library
Volume
Sleep Timer
Audio fades out over the last 30 seconds so the silence doesn't startle you awake.
Background audio is enabled. Playback continues when the screen locks. Lock-screen transport controls require a native bridge and are not yet wired in this WebView build.
Understanding Words in Noise
A "real-world" hearing test. We play a single word at the same time as background noise, and you tap which word you heard. Your Speech-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) tells you how much louder speech has to be than noise for you to understand it.
What SNR means:
- SNR +10 dB: speech is 10 dB louder than the noise (easy, like a quiet living room with the TV on)
- SNR +5 dB: slightly louder (typical home conversation)
- SNR 0 dB: speech and noise equally loud (busy office)
- SNR -5 dB: noise louder than speech (restaurant, party)
Most people with normal hearing can still understand words down to about SNR 0. Difficulty hearing at SNR +5 or higher often means hearing-in-noise loss even if your tone test looks fine.
Choose difficulty
Which word did you hear?
Word-in-Noise Result
Hearing Glossary
Plain-English definitions for hearing terms.
Insurance Navigator
Hearing aids cost thousands without coverage. Most people don't realize what's actually available to them.
What kind of coverage do you have?
Who's behind your hearing benefit?
Most insurance hearing benefits route through one of these four network administrators.
Settings
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Caring for someone else
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About
Contact a hearing professional
About iHEARtest
Who builds this, how it works, what it can and can't do.
Who makes iHEARtest
iHEARtest is published by OTCHealth, the digital health brand of InnerScope Hearing Technologies (Nasdaq OTC: INND), a hearing device company with over a decade of experience manufacturing hearing products. OTCHealth also sells over-the-counter hearing devices through the in-app Shop and at otchealthmart.com. The screening result you see is the same whether or not you visit the Shop.
How we make money
The screening tool is free. Devices in the Shop tab are how we pay for it, a disclosed commercial relationship. Sharpen Your Hearing is a separate training subscription, currently in Beta at $19/year (Day 1 free; regular price $39/year once Days 2-28 ship in Q3 2026). iHEARtest Pro is a planned future tier; nothing exists behind that name yet. The screening result you see is the same whether or not you ever visit the Shop tab.
The family behind iHEARtest
The Moore family has been in the hearing business since the 1940s. Across three generations, we've helped over 500,000 people with their hearing. iHEARtest brings that experience to your phone.
With more than 35 years of hands-on experience in hearing care, Mark Moore built and operated more than 70 hearing clinics across the United States and personally fit over 10,000 people with hearing devices. Mark reviews iHEARtest's screening method and content, and validates every public release of the app. Mark is second-generation; founder Matt Moore is third.
A broader Medical Advisory Board (including an audiologist and otolaryngologist, MD) is in recruitment. Those names will be published here when confirmed. Until then, Mark Moore is the named reviewer for all content.
Methodology & sources
- Hearing Number (0-100): Derived from the four-frequency pure-tone average (500, 1000, 2000, 4000 Hz) per the Johns Hopkins Cochlear Center for Hearing & Public Health "Hearing Number" framework (Lin et al., 2021). Lower values indicate sharper hearing.
- HHIE-S questionnaire: Hearing Handicap Inventory for the Elderly, Screening version, 10 items, Ventry & Weinstein, 1983. Used as a self-report complement to the tone-threshold test.
- Word-in-Noise: Closed-set word recognition in speech-shaped noise across fixed SNR levels. Not a substitute for a clinic-administered QuickSIN or HINT test.
- Decibel Meter: Reads the phone microphone's A-weighted level. Phone microphones are not calibrated to a known SPL reference; readings are approximate (typically ±5 dB on iPhone, more variance on Android). Do not use for OSHA-compliant noise monitoring.
- Volume calibration: Loudness-match between a 1 kHz reference tone and a speech-band anchor (Mimi-style), to normalize playback level across devices and headphones before the audiometry test.
Single-ear test methodology
iHEARtest measures each ear separately using headphones. It does not apply contralateral masking (narrow-band masking noise in the non-test ear), which is the standard clinical technique for separating one ear's threshold from the other when hearing is asymmetric. This means the test is suitable for screening symmetric hearing loss but may overestimate thresholds in the better ear when one ear has a substantially worse loss than the other. For users with suspected asymmetric loss, sudden one-sided hearing change, or a meaningful left-vs-right difference on this screening, see a licensed audiologist for masked threshold testing.
FDA regulatory status
iHEARtest is a general wellness / hearing screening tool. It is not an FDA-cleared diagnostic audiometer and is not a Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) under 21 CFR 880. It does not diagnose hearing loss, prescribe hearing aids, or replace a clinical audiologic evaluation. Results are intended to help you decide whether to seek a professional evaluation.
Known limitations
- Test-retest variability: Self-administered tone audiometry on consumer headphones typically varies by ±5 to ±10 dB between sessions, more in noisy rooms or with poor headphone seal. A single change of 5 dB on retest is usually within normal variability, not a real shift.
- Headphone calibration: Calibration profiles exist for AirPods, EarPods, generic over-ear, and generic earbuds. Other headphones use a generic profile that may bias thresholds by 5-15 dB.
- Ambient noise: Room noise above ~35 dB SPL elevates low-frequency thresholds. The app does not actively reject noisy environments.
- No masking: See "Single-ear test methodology" above.
- No bone conduction: Cannot distinguish sensorineural from conductive loss. A clinic test can.
- Cognitive/dementia claims: Hearing loss is statistically associated with higher dementia risk (Livingston/Lancet Commission, 2024), and the 2023 ACHIEVE trial showed hearing aids reduced cognitive decline in higher-risk older adults but not in the general population. iHEARtest and OTCHealth do not claim that any app, hearing aid, or other product prevents dementia.
Project history
OTCHealth's hearing-care line traces back to the Moore family, three generations and 80+ years of practice in hearing care. That history is the company's heritage; it is not a substitute for the medical-advisor credentials listed above, which is why we list both.
4-week auditory training
10 minutes a day. Trains the listening skills that pure-tone screening misses: speech in noise, sentences in babble, and auditory working memory.
- Day 1 available now. Establishes your SNR-50 baseline. Free.
- Days 2-28 rolling out Q3 2026. Graduated lessons that adapt to your performance.
- Weekly progress chart vs your starting SNR-50.
Training is an adjunct to screening, not a substitute for an audiologist's evaluation. Subscription managed in your Apple ID / Google Play account settings.