Clinical auditory profiling and hearing-aid fitting strategies

In audiological clinics, the choice of a hearing aid and the adjustment of its amplification and processing parameters are today mostly based on the audiogram, a measure of pure-tone hearing sensitivity at different frequencies. While adjusting the gain of a hearing aid based on the loss of sensitivity reflected by the audiogram can be successful in restoring audibility of soft sounds and improving speech intelligibility in quiet situations, it is well established that hearing-impaired listeners still experience difficulty with understanding speech in more complex listening situations that are typical of everyday life, such as noisy and reverberant environments (Moore, 2007). Despite amplification from the hearing aid, sounds are thus still perceived as distorted, and this “distortion loss” (Plomp, 1978) is still a challenge to compensate for in practice.
The idea of the present project is to improve the hearing-aid fitting process and suggest parameter adjustment rationales based on a more complete evaluation of each patient’s hearing profile that reflects distortion loss as well. It is hypothesized that hearing-aid benefit can be improved by directly relating outcomes from such an extended clinical hearing profile to the choice of hearing-aid fitting.