1 Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, Boston University, MA, USA.
Trends Hear. 2017 Jan-Dec;21:2331216517722304. doi: 10.1177/2331216517722304.
The aim of this study was to evaluate the performance of a visually guided hearing aid (VGHA) under conditions designed to capture some aspects of "real-world" communication settings. The VGHA uses eye gaze to steer the acoustic look direction of a highly directional beamforming microphone array. Although the VGHA has been shown to enhance speech intelligibility for fixed-location, frontal targets, it is currently not known whether these benefits persist in the face of frequent changes in location of the target talker that are typical of conversational turn-taking. Participants were 14 young adults, 7 with normal hearing and 7 with bilateral sensorineural hearing impairment. Target stimuli were sequences of 12 question-answer pairs that were embedded in a mixture of competing conversations. The participant's task was to respond via a key press after each answer indicating whether it was correct or not. Spatialization of the stimuli and microphone array processing were done offline using recorded impulse responses, before presentation over headphones. The look direction of the array was steered according to the eye movements of the participant as they followed a visual cue presented on a widescreen monitor. Performance was compared for a "dynamic" condition in which the target stimulus moved between three locations, and a "fixed" condition with a single target location. The benefits of the VGHA over natural binaural listening observed in the fixed condition were reduced in the dynamic condition, largely because visual fixation was less accurate.
本研究旨在评估视觉引导助听(VGHA)在设计用于捕捉“真实世界”通信环境某些方面的条件下的性能。VGHA 使用眼动来引导高度指向性波束形成麦克风阵列的声学注视方向。尽管已经证明 VGHA 可以提高固定位置、正面目标的语音可懂度，但目前尚不清楚在目标说话者位置频繁变化的情况下，这些益处是否仍然存在，这种位置变化是会话交替的典型特征。参与者为 14 名年轻成年人，其中 7 名听力正常，7 名双侧感音神经性听力障碍。目标刺激是由 12 个问答对组成的序列，嵌入在竞争对话的混合物中。参与者的任务是在每个答案后通过按键回答是或否，以表明答案是否正确。刺激的空间化和麦克风阵列的处理是使用录制的脉冲响应在线下完成的，然后通过耳机呈现。根据参与者在宽屏显示器上呈现的视觉提示跟踪的眼动来引导阵列的注视方向。比较了目标刺激在三个位置之间移动的“动态”条件和具有单个目标位置的“固定”条件下的性能。在固定条件下观察到的 VGHA 相对于自然双耳聆听的优势在动态条件下降低了，主要是因为视觉固定不太准确。
