Examining the Use and Benefits of Low-/Mild-Gain Hearing Aids in Service Members with Normal Hearing Thresholds and Self-Reported Hearing Difficulties.

Low- (or mild-) gain hearing aids (LGHAs) are increasingly considered for individuals with normal peripheral hearing but significant self-reported hearing difficulties (SHDs). This study assesses the benefits of LGHAs as a management option for individuals with normal hearing thresholds (NHTs) and SHDs, comparing LGHA use and benefit to individuals with non-significant hearing difficulties (NHDs) and those with peripheral hearing loss. Questionnaires addressing hearing aid usage, benefit, hearing difficulties, and tinnitus were administered to 186 individuals who self-identified as hearing aid users in a sample of 6652 service members who were receiving their annual hearing tests.

The Effects of Signal to Noise Ratio, T60 , Wide-Dynamic Range Compression Speed, and Digital Noise Reduction in a Virtual Restaurant Setting.

Objectives: Hearing aid processing in realistic listening environments is difficult to study effectively. Often the environment is unpredictable or unknown, such as in wearable aid trials with subjective report by the wearer. Some laboratory experiments create listening environments to exert tight experimental control, but those environments are often limited by physical space, a small number of sound sources, or room absorptive properties.

Updating the Spectral Correlation Index: Integrating Audibility and Band Importance Using Speech Intelligibility Index Weights.

The original Spectral Correlation Index ( ) is a measure of amplitude envelope distortion that has been used in several studies to predict behavioral results. Because the original did not account for the differential contribution of particular frequency bands to speech intelligibility (i.e.

Using Machine Learning and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to Classify Individuals With Hearing Loss.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, there was mounting interest in remote testing solutions for audiology. The ultimate goal of such work was to improve access to hearing healthcare for individuals that might be unable or reluctant to seek audiological help in a clinic. In 2015, Diane Van Tasell patented a method for measuring an audiogram when the precise signal level was unknown (patent US 8,968,209 B2).

Reverberation strength perceived by normal-hearing listeners predictable based on time-varying binaural loudness.

Previous work has explored novel binaural combinations of reverberation and the resulting perceived reverberation strength (reverberance). The present study examines the perceptual effects of additional binaural combinations of reverberation with the goal of explaining reverberance in terms of basic psychoacoustic principles. Stimuli were generated using virtual space techniques simulating a speech source 3 m to the listener's right in a moderately reverberant environment.

The Effect of Hearing Loss on Localization of Amplitude-Panned and Physical Sources.

Background: Clinics are increasingly turning toward using virtual environments to demonstrate and validate hearing aid fittings in "realistic" listening situations before the patient leaves the clinic. One of the most cost-effective and straightforward ways to create such an environment is through the use of a small speaker array and amplitude panning. Amplitude panning is a signal playback method used to change the perceived location of a source by changing the level of two or more loudspeakers.

A dissociation between speech understanding and perceived reverberation.

As direct-to-reverberant energy ratio (DRR) decreases or decay time increases, speech intelligibility tends to decrease for both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners. Given this relationship, it is easy to assume that perceived reverberation (reverberance) would act as an intermediary-as physical reverberation increases, so does reverberance, and speech intelligibility decreases as a result. This assumption has not been tested explicitly.

Speech perception adjusts to stable spectrotemporal properties of the listening environment.

When perceiving speech, listeners compensate for reverberation and stable spectral peaks in the speech signal. Despite natural listening conditions usually adding both reverberation and spectral coloration, these processes have only been studied separately. Reverberation smears spectral peaks across time, which is predicted to increase listeners' compensation for these peaks.