Institute of Hearing Technology and Audiology, Jade University of Applied Sciences, and Cluster of Excellence Hearing4All, Oldenburg, Germany.
Ear Hear. 2020 Nov/Dec;41 Suppl 1:79S-90S. doi: 10.1097/AUD.0000000000000934.
Common methods to assess hearing deficits and the benefit of hearing devices include retrospective questionnaires and speech tests under controlled conditions. As typically applied, both approaches suffer from serious limitations regarding their ecological validity. An alternative approach rapidly gaining widespread use is ecological momentary assessment (EMA), which employs repeated assessments of individual everyday situations. Smartphones facilitate the implementation of questionnaires and rating schemes to be administered in the real life of study participants or customers, during or shortly after an experience. In addition, objective acoustical parameters extracted from head- or body-worn microphones and/or settings from the hearing aid's signal processing unit can be stored alongside the questionnaire data. The advantages of using EMA include participant-specific, context-sensitive information on activities, experienced challenges, and preferences. However, to preserve the privacy of all communication partners and bystanders, the law in many countries does not allow audio recordings, limiting the information about environmental acoustics to statistical data such as, for example, levels and averaged spectra. Other challenges for EMA are, for example, the unsupervised handling of the equipment, the trade-off between the accuracy of description and the number of similar listening situations when performing comparisons (e.g., with and without hearing aids), the trade-off between the duration of recording intervals and the amount of data collected and analyzed, the random or target-oriented reminder for subjective responses, as well as the willingness and ability of the participants to respond while doing specific tasks. This contribution reviews EMA in hearing research, its purpose, current applications, and possible future directions.
评估听力缺陷和听力设备益处的常用方法包括回顾性问卷和在受控条件下的言语测试。通常应用的这两种方法在其生态有效性方面都存在严重的局限性。一种正在迅速广泛应用的替代方法是生态瞬时评估（EMA），它采用对个体日常情况的重复评估。智能手机便于在研究参与者或客户的真实生活中实施问卷和评分方案，在体验期间或之后不久进行。此外，可以从头戴式或体戴式麦克风提取的客观声学参数和/或助听器信号处理单元的设置可以与问卷数据一起存储。使用 EMA 的优点包括有关活动、体验到的挑战和偏好的特定于参与者的、上下文敏感的信息。然而，为了保护所有通信伙伴和旁观者的隐私，许多国家的法律不允许进行音频录制，这限制了有关环境声学的信息仅为统计数据，例如，例如，水平和平均频谱。EMA 的其他挑战包括，例如，设备的无人监督处理、在执行比较时描述准确性和类似听力情况数量之间的权衡（例如，有和没有助听器）、记录间隔持续时间和收集和分析的数据量之间的权衡、针对主观响应的随机或有针对性的提醒，以及参与者在执行特定任务时愿意和能够响应。本贡献回顾了听力研究中的 EMA、其目的、当前应用和可能的未来方向。
