Hörzentrum Oldenburg gGmbH, Oldenburg, Germany.
Cluster of Excellence "Hearing4all", Oldenburg, Germany.
Trends Hear. 2024 Jan-Dec;28:23312165241271407. doi: 10.1177/23312165241271407.
A major goal of hearing-device provision is to improve communication in daily life. However, there is still a large gap between the user's daily-life aided listening experience and hearing-aid benefit as assessed with established speech reception measurements in the laboratory and clinical practice. For a more realistic assessment, hearing-aid provision needs to be tested in suitable acoustic environments. In this study, using virtual acoustics, we developed complex acoustic scenarios to measure speech-intelligibility and listening-effort benefit obtained from hearing-aid amplification and signal enhancement strategies. Measurements were conducted using the participants' own devices and a research hearing aid, the Portable Hearing Laboratory (PHL). On the PHL, in addition to amplification, a monaural and a binaural directional filter, as well as a spectral filter were employed. We assessed the benefit from different signal enhancement strategies at the group and the individual level. At the group level, signal enhancement including directional filtering provided a higher hearing-aid benefit in challenging acoustic scenarios in terms of speech intelligibility compared to amplification alone or combined with spectral filtering. However, no difference between monaural and binaural signal enhancement occurred. On an individual level, we found large differences in hearing-aid benefit between participants. While some benefitted from signal-enhancement algorithms, others benefitted from amplification alone, but additional signal enhancement had a detrimental effect. This shows the importance of an individual selection of signal enhancement strategies as a part of the hearing-aid fitting process.
助听设备的主要目标是改善日常生活中的交流。然而，在实验室和临床实践中，使用既定的言语接受测量评估用户的日常生活辅助聆听体验和助听获益之间仍然存在很大差距。为了更真实地评估，助听设备的提供需要在合适的声学环境中进行测试。在这项研究中，我们使用虚拟声学技术开发了复杂的声学场景，以测量从助听放大和信号增强策略中获得的言语可懂度和聆听努力获益。使用参与者自己的设备和研究用助听设备（便携式听力实验室，PHL）进行了测量。在 PHL 上，除了放大之外，还使用了单耳和双耳定向滤波器以及频谱滤波器。我们在群体和个体水平上评估了不同信号增强策略的获益。在群体水平上，与仅放大或与频谱滤波相结合相比，包括定向滤波在内的信号增强在具有挑战性的声学场景中提供了更高的言语可懂度助听获益。然而，单耳和双耳信号增强之间没有差异。在个体水平上，我们发现参与者之间的助听获益存在很大差异。虽然一些人受益于信号增强算法，但另一些人则受益于单独的放大，但额外的信号增强会产生不利影响。这表明作为助听适配过程的一部分，对信号增强策略进行个体选择非常重要。
