What is it about?

In this study, Signia’s “RealTime Conversation Enhancement” technology was evaluated in a mall food court by a group of adult hearing aid wearers. They listened to a series of group conversations and provided ratings on a variety of aspects including speech clarity and understanding, background noise levels, listening effort, and preference. Results showed this technology, which performs an acoustic analysis of the conversation scene and uses multiple adaptive beams to track different speakers, improved the hearing aid wearers' ability to understand a group conversation clearly, and significantly reduced their listening effort compared to the previous level of technology.

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Why is it important?

Hearing aid wearers often struggle to follow conversations in noisy environments. Group conversations are important for socializing and connection. Study results suggest that advancements in hearing aid technology that account for the natural head movements and multiple conversation partners could significantly enhance the listening experience for people with hearing loss in challenging everyday situations.

Perspectives

Testing hearing aids where people actually wear hearing aids helps to validate what technology advances work in the real-world. Participants in the study often commented on how excited they were to be moving the testing out of the lab and into a place where they struggle in real life. Collecting their opinions and preferences in a realistic environment was very meaningful.

Paula Folkeard

While testing hearing aids in the lab is still important in the development and validation of new hearing aid technology, it gets increasingly more important to develop and use assessment methods with a higher degree of ecological validity to make sure we are solving the problems the technology was developed to solve. Even though we lose control when moving outside the lab, conducting hearing aid testing in the real-world environments where wearers experience their problems, as done in this study, is an important step in the right direction.

Niels Søgaard Jensen
WS Audiology

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Hearing at the Mall: Multibeam Processing Technology Improves Hearing Group Conversations in a Real-World Food Court Environment, American Journal of Audiology, July 2024, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2024_aja-24-00027.
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