Auditory Profiling and Profile-based Hearing-aid Processing Strategies: Towards Precision Audiology for Hearing Rehabilitation

  • Raul Sanchez Lopez (Guest lecturer)
  • Michal Fereczkowski (Other)
  • Santurette, S. (Other)
  • Tobias Neher (Other)
  • Dau, T. (Other)

Activity: Talks and presentationsConference presentations

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.
Period24 Nov 2019
Event titleAudiological Research Cores in Europe 2019
Event typeConference
LocationParis, FranceShow on map