Evaluating New Hearing Aid Technologies in Laboratory Simulations of Listening Scenarios

It can be important for clinical researchers to be able to evaluate the performance of sensory aids using both objective and subjective methods. To this end, a new method is being developed and refined in CATSS for assessing new technologies (such as self-fit hearing aids) in a laboratory setting using calibrated listening scenarios that reflect daily listening situations.

Dr. Peggy Nelson and colleagues have developed simulations of challenging conversational scenarios to allow users of sensory aids to make judgments of sensory aid performance in realistic, but controlled conditions in CATSS's multisensory lab. Listeners with hearing loss can make ratings of intelligibility, sound quality, and preference in scenarios such as small-group conversations and entertainment listening. At the same time, objective measures of hearing-aid gain and speech intelligibility can also be obtained. These subjective and objective measures can then be compared to additional subjective surveys such as the Speech, Spatial and Qualities of Hearing Scale (SSQ, Gatehouse & Noble, 2004) and Social Participation restrictions questionnaire (SPaRQ, Heffernan et al., 2018) to determine relationships among intelligibility, preference, benefit, and hearing aid gain. The aim of this work is to help refine methods for evaluating the performance of emerging technologies for hearing loss.