gms | German Medical Science

Despite the availability of advanced hearing aids, hearing in acoustically complex situations is still a problem for people with hearing loss. To improve hearing aids, it is important to evaluate their performance in such situations in the laboratory. Hendrikse et al. [1] developed a set of complex virtual audiovisual test environments resembling real life situations, to investigate the natural movement behavior of normal hearing participants. Their findings show that head movement as measured in people with normal hearing would reduce the benefit provided by directional hearing aid algorithms [2]. The measured data were used as a basis to assess the movement behavior of hearing impaired people, presented here. Specifically, the research question of the present study was to investigate whether hearing aid users adapt their behavior depending on the hearing aid directivity and how this influences the hearing aid performance.

We measured the movement behavior of 30 hearing impaired participants in virtual audiovisual environments (living room, cafeteria, lecture hall, train station, street) reproduced in the lab with the simulation toolbox TASCAR [3]. As participants, older hearing-impaired participants were recruited, of which 9 wore no hearing aid and 21 were used to wearing a hearing aid. The 21 experienced hearing-aid users were fitted with a simulated hearing aid implemented in the openMHA [4] during the experiment, which provided amplification according to the NAL-RP fitting rule with additional compression. 11 of the experienced hearing-aid users were also fitted with an adaptive directional microphone. The results show significant differences in movement behavior between the participant groups.