Project Models

Management: Dr. Thomas Brand, Universität Oldenburg


Topic:

Model-based concepts on improving hearing diagnostics and hearing aid customization  

Outline:

The healthy human auditory system has the amazing ability to comprehend language in noisy environments when noise and distracting speech come from different directions (e.g. in train stations or at celebrations). Unfortunately, hearing impaired persons especially have a hard time understanding speech in such situations.

Audiological measurement procedures offered by HörTech (e.g. The Oldenburg Sentence Test) offer the chance to quickly and precisely assess this handicap in individual hearing impaired persons. This can be of great significance in order to find optimal adjustments for a hearing aid. Yet until now, audiological measurement procedures had certain disadvantages. Distracting noise, for instance, was pretty unrealistic. In HörTech's Project II (Models), new methods have been developed which incorporate more natural disturbing speech / noise. Thus with virtual acoustic methods noise as well as speech can be presented artificially from different directions and distances, played via headphones to patients.  In this way, surrounding sound (reverberation) can be simulated. This improvement in audiological measurement technology, however, poses a problem for ENT doctors for they must learn how do correctly interpret the method's results.

This is where HörTech's Project II (Models) comes into play: Binaural prediction of speech comprehension is capable of prognosing expected speech intelligibility of a hearing impaired person under almost any acoustical conditons (direction and number of distracting sounds, reverberation). An ENT doctor can compare individual results (e.g. 50% sentences understood, 75 dB of distracting noise from the left side of a very reverberating room) with predictions made for exactly that situation. If results differ significantly from the prognosis, they are a sign not for an ear impairment, but rather for a disturbance in central nervous processing of sound. That can be an indicator for serious illnesses. This procedure also relays information on whether an individual patient only needs one hearing aid or if two would be advantageous.