The Impact of Hearing Aids on Listening Effort and Listening-Related Fatigue - Investigations in a Virtual Realistic Listening Environment.

Participation in complex listening situations such as group conversations in noisy environments sets high demands on the auditory system and on cognitive processing. Reports of hearing-impaired people indicate that strenuous listening situations occurring throughout the day lead to feelings of fatigue at the end of the day. The aim of the present study was to develop a suitable test sequence to evoke and measure listening effort (LE) and listening-related fatigue (LRF), and, to evaluate the influence of hearing aid use on both dimensions in mild to moderately hearing-impaired participants.

The Concurrent OLSA Test: A Method for Speech Recognition in Multi-talker Situations at Fixed SNR.

A multi-talker paradigm is introduced that uses different attentional processes to adjust speech-recognition scores with the goal of conducting measurements at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). The basic idea is to simulate a group conversation with three talkers. Talkers alternately speak sentences of the German matrix test OLSA.

Binaural Signal Processing in Hearing Aids.

For many years, clinicians have understood the advantages of listening with two ears compared with one. In addition to improved speech intelligibility in quiet, noisy, and reverberant environments, binaural versus monaural listening improves perceived sound quality and decreases the effort listeners must expend to understand a target voice of interest or to monitor a multitude of potential target voices. For most individuals with bilateral hearing impairment, the body of evidence collected across decades of research has also found that the provision of two compared with one hearing aid yields significant benefit for the user.

Effect of Directional Microphone Technology in Hearing Aids on Neural Correlates of Listening and Memory Effort: An Electroencephalographic Study.

The aim of the study was to compare the effect of different spatial noise-processing algorithms in hearing aids on listening effort and memory effort on a subjective, behavioral, and neurophysiological level using electroencephalography (EEG). Two types of directional microphone (DM) technologies for spatial noise processing were chosen: one with a wide directionality (wide DM) and another with a narrower directionality (narrow DM) to accentuate the speech source. Participants with a severe hearing loss were fitted with hearing aids and participated in two EEG experiments.

A preliminary investigation into hearing aid fitting based on automated real-ear measurements integrated in the fitting software: test-retest reliability, matching accuracy and perceptual outcomes.

Objective: The recent integration of automated real-ear measurements (REM) in the fitting software facilitates the hearing aid fitting process. Such a fitting strategy, TargetMatch (TM), was evaluated. Test-retest reliability and matching accuracy were quantified, and compared to a REM-based fitting with manual adjustment.