Live evaluation of auditory preference for group conversations

Abstract

Improving hearing-impaired people's ability to participate in conversations is important. To date, few outcome measures let us relate conversation success to hearing impairment and hearing-aid function. In a previous study, we developed the LEAP test (Smeds et al. 2021), where a test leader guided one participant through a set of listening scenarios, in which the participant compared two hearing-aid settings and reported the preferred setting. The current study extends the LEAP test to unsupervised group conversations. Nine groups of three participants held conversations sparked by so-called consensus questions. Two test scenarios were used: “business meeting” (where a projector created low-level background noise) and “dinner party” (where an ambisonics recording reproduced in 2-D was used as background). Two test paradigms were evaluated: direct comparisons, where participants toggled between the two hearing-aid settings during a conversation and then selected their preferred setting, and indirect comparisons, where one hearing-aid setting was used at the time and participants after each conversation rated how well the hearing aids worked in the current setting, and the preferred setting was determined by comparing the two ratings. The reliability of the two test paradigms was evaluated. At the time of the submission of this abstract, analyses are ongoing.