The BEAR project was presented at the American Auditory Society’s Scientific & Technology Meeting February 28 – March 2, 2019:

BEAR – A Large Scale Effort to Improve Clinical Practice

Nikolai Bisgaard,M.Sc EE, GN Hearing, Ballerup, Denmark

A large scale study on clinical practices and hearing aid fitting has been started in Denmark in 2016 with aim of achieving better precision in fitting and creating new improved clinical guidelines. This $ 7.5 mill. program is a joint effort by 3 Universities, 3 Danish University Hospitals, 3 Danish hearing aid manufactures and the Danish certification laboratory. The program has three phases. The first phase has three focus areas: Acquisition of 2000 patients as a reference set using current clinical practices, development of improved outcome assessment and patient profiling and new signal processing strategies adapted to the more detailed profiling. Phase two centers on validation of the new strategies, studies on subpopulations with low benefit and development of a new efficient clinical strategy. Phase three includes studies on patient driven diagnostics and fitting and revising standards for clinical practice. The presentation will give an overview of the program as well as some of the first results.