The photo shows some of the BEAR project participants during discussion of future listening tests (from left: Sabina HS Houmøller, Anne Wolff, Jesper Hvass Schmidt, Gert Ravn, Karen Wibling Solgaard, and Thomas Behrens).

Project meetings with sound

Project meetings are held recurrently, typically with six joint meetings annually plus several separate meetings with more narrow agendas in between. On June 13th, 2017 a joint meeting was held at Aalborg University for all currently active work areas, and the meeting included among other demonstrations of some of the psychoacoustic tests, which may eventually be future clinical tests.

Many of these tests require that the patient has to listen to different pieces of sound and often compare sounds, which are very similar. It is both difficult and fatiguing, which is why we spend a considerable amount of time choosing the methods that provide most new knowledge in shortest time and with the least annoyance for the patient. Some of the methods can be applied both with and without hearing aids, whereas others are tailored for one or the other.

At the project meeting we also made a status for the registration of data for the centralized clinical database. Much more than half of the data that were planned to constitute the reference to new strategies for profiling and fitting have been collected. It takes slightly longer than originally planned, because it also includes measurements with microphones behind the hearing aids for documentation, which is not currently part of the usual routine. The work, nevertheless, proceed as planned, and the collection of reference data will conclude late 2017.