Description
Currently, the clinical characterization of hearing deficits for hearing-aid fitting is based on the pure-tone audiogram only. Implicitly, this assumes that the audiogram can predict performance on complex, supra-threshold tasks. Sanchez-Lopez et al. (Trends in Hearing, Vol. 22, 2018) hypothesized that the hearing deficits of a given listener, both at threshold and supra-threshold levels, result from two independent types of auditory distortion. In their study, a data-driven method for classifying the listeners into four auditory profiles, which differed in terms of their degree of auditory distortions, was proposed and validated. Here, a heterogeneous group of listeners was tested across three locations using a test-battery designed to tap into different aspects of hearing, including speech perception in quiet and noise, loudness perception, binaural processing abilities, and spectro-temporal resolution. The collected data were analyzed using the analysis developed by Sanchez-Lopez et al. (2018), which yielded four clinically relevant patient subpopulations. In the same way that stratified medicine applies specific therapies to specific patient populations, a profile-based hearing-aid fitting strategy was proposed as a form of “precision audiology”. In the present study, stratified hearing solutions were tested with listeners belonging to the four proposed auditory profiles. Using a hearing-aid simulator, the listeners’ subjective preference for the proposed hearing-aid processing strategies was assessed in various realistic sound scenarios. The results suggested that the different auditory profiles can be associated with different preferences for specific hearing-aid parameters. Moreover, profile-based hearing-aid fitting may be extended to new paradigms of hearing loss compensation and advanced signal processing.Period | 24 Nov 2019 |
---|---|
Event title | Audiological Research Cores in Europe 2019 |
Event type | Conference |
Location | Paris, FranceShow on map |