Applied hearing aids and signal processing for aural (re-)habilitation

Abstract

Students who complete undergraduate aural (re-)habilitation courses in the speech and hearing science are generally interested in going into speech-language pathology, and in lower numbers, audiology, healthcare or education. A fundamental concept that students learn in this course is the applied relation among speech acoustics, signal processing, and hearing loss. I have incorporated an in-class hearing aid laboratory to provide students with the opportunity to (1) handle hearing aids, understand their components and accessories; (2) troubleshoot basic problems with hearing aids (e.g., dead battery, acoustic feedback) that they might encounter in clinical or educational settings (e.g., therapy session, classroom, nursing home, etc.); and (3) listen to hearing aids to determine what speech frequency ranges are influenced when settings are changed and how this relates to a listener’s hearing loss and their access to the speech spectrum. The lab is carried out in small groups with both current hearing aids and older models that allow students to change the frequency spectrum without a computer (e.g., screw sets that adjust the gain in specific frequency ranges), so that the lab can easily be completed in class following lectures introducing the material.