Research on hearing-aid self-adjustment by adults

Abstract

The purpose of the work is to develop a protocol for user self-adjustment of hearing aids and to determine its efficacy and candidacy. An initial study involved 26 adults with hearing loss. Control of overall volume, high-frequency boost, and low-frequency cut employed prerecorded and preprocessed sentence stimuli. Participants took a speech-perception test after an initial self-adjustment and then had the opportunity to repeat the adjustment. The final self-selected outputs were not significantly different from those prescribed by a widely used threshold-based method (NAL-NL2)—regardless of prior hearing-aid experience. All but one participant attained a speech-intelligibility index of 60%. Previous users of hearing aids, however, did not meet this criterion until after taking the speech-perception test. This work is continuing with the UCSD Open-source Speech-processing Platform which provides real-time, six-band, processing of microphone input from ear-level transducer assemblies. This system provides a more realistic participant experience, finer control of level and spectrum, and places no limits on the speech materials used for self-adjustment and outcome assessment. Ongoing work investigates the need for the speech-perception test as part of the self-adjustment protocol and the importance of the level and spectrum from which users make their initial adjustments.The purpose of the work is to develop a protocol for user self-adjustment of hearing aids and to determine its efficacy and candidacy. An initial study involved 26 adults with hearing loss. Control of overall volume, high-frequency boost, and low-frequency cut employed prerecorded and preprocessed sentence stimuli. Participants took a speech-perception test after an initial self-adjustment and then had the opportunity to repeat the adjustment. The final self-selected outputs were not significantly different from those prescribed by a widely used threshold-based method (NAL-NL2)—regardless of prior hearing-aid experience. All but one participant attained a speech-intelligibility index of 60%. Previous users of hearing aids, however, did not meet this criterion until after taking the speech-perception test. This work is continuing with the UCSD Open-source Speech-processing Platform which provides real-time, six-band, processing of microphone input from ear-level transducer assemblies. This system provides ...