gms | German Medical Science

While having normal hearing thresholds, patients with spatial processing disorder (SPD) suffer from a reduced ability to use binaural cues to achieve spatial release from masking (SRM). As a result, their ability to localize sound sources and to follow and understand speech in acoustically challenging situations is impaired [1]. There is a high prevalence of auditory processing disorders such as SPD in the school-aged population affecting around 5% of school-aged children and half of all children with learning disorders [2]. Moreover, these deficits are known to hinder the normal development of their listening, learning, and communication skills [3]. Developing appropriate and accessible procedures and technologies to aid the diagnosis and deficit-specific remediation of these conditions is a high priority in current research.

To address this concern, the research project "ViWer-S" focuses on developing technical aids to improve the hearing experience of school-aged children with SPD. The first approach, "Binaural hearing in the classroom," focuses on developing an alternative to the traditional wireless acoustic transmission system or so-called "FM system." We propose a technical solution that, using beamforming and deep neural network technologies, allows dynamic binaural presentation of the classroom's sound field in real-time, i.e., the improved signal presented to the listener through the hearing aid will also include the sound sources' spatial information. As a result, the listeners will hear the spatial sound field externalized, with sound sources having correct directional information, rather than internalized, i.e., in their heads, as with traditional personal FM systems. This approach improves the signal-to-noise ratio in acoustically challenging environments like the classroom. At the same time, it prevents the listeners' spatial hearing abilities from being potentially worsened by prolonged exposure to non-spatialized signals.

"Binaural hearing in the virtual world," the second approach of our research, focuses on developing applications in virtual reality (VR) to aid the diagnosis of SPD and promote the improvement of the listener's binaural listening abilities through auditory training. We intend to make diagnosis and remediation more accessible and portable by providing tools to assess and train binaural listening abilities in a standalone head-mounted display. Moreover, such auditory training applications are a tool to investigate the potential of VR for spatial hearing rehabilitation, allowing us to include state-of-the-art auditory spatialization techniques and target spatial cross-modal reorganization through multisensory stimulation (audition, vision, and proprioception). This manuscript summarizes the current state of our research and the following work within the ViWer-S research project.

A long version of this article is available here:

https://www.dga-ev.com/fileadmin/dga2022/Ramirez_Manuscript_DGA_2022.pdf