Smart phones won't cut it for me, unfortunately. I'm -110dB in one ear[1] and -80dB in the other. If the better ear gets any worse, I'm elegible for a cochlear implant!
You've a lower noise floor than a knock-off spectrum analyser! Does that make general life difficult? Can you watch normal TV etc? My father has typical age related bandwidth reduction. I've had to adjust his TV accordingly, but for "normal hearers" it sounds very wrong.
McBryce.
It makes life less predictable in the sense that in a phone conversation I may or may not be able to pick up the next word/sentence. Some people/accents are difficult for me, some aren't. English has a lot of redundancy, so I can infer many words - but not names.
As for TV, subtitling is very important. Surprsingly quite a few of the TV channels aimed at oldies don't have subtitles, presumably because they are too old/niche for it to be profitable. Also the "clear speech" type option means I can radically reduce the volume from ~50 to ~20, which helps my daughter!
One analogy I've found useful is to compare it to dyslexia. Apparently dyslexics describe it as having the letters jiggle around and swap positions. My hearing is much like that with phonemes. A sentence can be understandable except for one swkxhhwn buried in the middle. Repeating that swkxhhwn louder doesn't help, but if a different "sequence of letters" is used, then it becomes instantly recognisable that "swkxhhwn" is "word".
Fortunately, as is typical of engineers, I don't feel the need for continually interacting with carbon-based self-propelled virus factories. My daughter's (rather interesting/intelligent/demanding) dog is sufficient