Two presentations with relation to the BEAR projektet were given at the International Congress for Acoustics in Aachen, Germany, September 9-13, 2019:
11.09.2019, 14:00-14:20
Raul Sanchez-Lopez*, Silje Nielsen, Oscar Cañete, Michal Fereczkowski, Mengfan Wu, Tobias Neher, Torsten Dau, Sébastien Santurette
One aim of the Better hEAring Rehabilitation (BEAR) project is to define a new clinical profiling tool, a test-battery, for individualized hearing loss characterization. Recently, Sanchez-Lopez et al. (ISAAR 2019) proposed a test battery for hearing deficit characterization. The proposed tests were divided into six categories: audibility, middle-ear analysis, speech perception, binaural-processing abilities, loudness perception, and spectro-temporal resolution. The results of 54 listeners were analyzed using a data-driven approach (Sanchez-Lopez et al., 2018), which provided evidence for the existence of two independent sources of distortion and four different auditory profiles. The classification of the listeners into auditory profiles allows the prediction of the performance of the listeners on different psychoacoustic tasks as well as their expected performance while wearing hearing aids. For the classification, a decision tree with only the most predictive tests is desirable for a correct classification of the listeners. The present study aims to explore the optimal decision tree and to propose a reduced, reliable and time-efficient test battery that can classify listeners into the four auditory profiles in a clinical environment. The clinical test battery will be used in a large-scale study that will help implement a protocol for better hearing rehabilitation.
11.09.2019, 14:20-14:40
Mengfan Wu*, Raul Sanchez-Lopez, Mouhamad El-Haj-Ali, Silje Nielsen, Michal Fereczkowski, Torsten Dau, Sébastien Santurette, Tobias Neher
The current study forms part of the Better hEAring Rehabilitation (BEAR) project, which aims at developing and evaluating new clinical tools for individual hearing loss characterization and hearing aid benefit assessment. The purpose of the current study was to assess the interaction between four different auditory profiles and two outcome measures of aided performance obtained for six selected hearing-aid processing strategies (Sanchez-Lopez et al., Euronoise 2018). Sixty older habitual hearing-aid users who participated in the study were previously classified into four auditory profiles based on a data-driven approach (Sanchez-Lopez et al., Trends in Hearing 2018). All stimuli were generated with the help of a hearing aid simulator and presented via headphones. Speech recognition in noise was assessed at fixed signal-to-noise ratios based on individual 50%-correct speech reception thresholds measured in a realistic noise environment. Subjective ratings of overall quality and noise annoyance were measured using a multiple stimulus comparison paradigm. It is hypothesized that the four auditory profiles will have different needs in terms of compensation so perceptual outcomes for the six hearing aid processing strategies are expected to be different.
(Raul Sanchez-Lopez and Mengfan Wu at ICA)
