On the Feasibility of Using Behavioral Listening Effort Test Methods to Evaluate Auditory Performance in Cochlear Implant Users.

Realistic outcome measures that reflect everyday hearing challenges are needed to assess hearing aid and cochlear implant (CI) fitting. Literature suggests that listening effort measures may be more sensitive to differences between hearing-device settings than established speech intelligibility measures when speech intelligibility is near maximum. Which method provides the most effective measurement of listening effort for this purpose is currently unclear.

Optimal size of DNA encapsidated by plant produced human papillomavirus pseudovirions.

Human papillomaviruses (HPVs) are known to be the cause of anogenital and oropharyngeal cancers as well as genital and common warts. HPV pseudovirions (PsVs) are synthetic viral particles that are made up of the L1 major and L2 minor HPV capsid proteins and up to 8 Kb of encapsidated pseudogenome dsDNA. HPV PsVs are used to test novel neutralising antibodies elicited by vaccines, for studying the virus life cycle, and potentially for the delivery of therapeutic DNA vaccines.

Self-motion with Hearing Impairment and (Directional) Hearing Aids.

When listening to a sound source in everyday situations, typical movement behavior is highly individual and may not result in the listener directly facing the sound source. Behavioral differences can affect the performance of directional algorithms in hearing aids, as was shown in previous work by using head movement trajectories of normal-hearing (NH) listeners in acoustic simulations for noise-suppression performance predictions. However, the movement behavior of hearing-impaired (HI) listeners with or without hearing aids may differ, and hearing-aid users might adapt their self-motion to improve the performance of directional algorithms.

Review of Self-Motion in the Context of Hearing and Hearing Device Research.

The benefit from directional hearing devices predicted in the lab often differs from reported user experience, suggesting that laboratory findings lack ecological validity. This difference may be partly caused by differences in self-motion between the lab and real-life environments. This literature review aims to provide an overview of the methods used to measure and quantify self-motion, the test environments, and the measurement paradigms.

Evaluation of the Influence of Head Movement on Hearing Aid Algorithm Performance Using Acoustic Simulations.

Head movements can improve sound localization performance and speech intelligibility in acoustic environments with spatially distributed sources. However, they can affect the performance of hearing aid algorithms, when adaptive algorithms have to adjust to changes in the acoustic scene caused by head movement (the so-called maladaptation effect) or when directional algorithms are not facing in the optimal direction because the head has moved away (the so-called misalignment effect). In this article, we investigated the mechanisms behind these maladaptation and misalignment effects for a set of six standard hearing aid algorithms using acoustic simulations based on premade databases; this was done so we could study the effects as carefully as possible.