A Comparison of Hearing Aid Noise Programs on Speech Intelligibility

A list of 20 sentences is presented from a speaker located in front of the participant. At the same time, background noise is presented from the same speaker at various SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) levels. That is, speech may be presented 5 dB lower/softer than the noise up to 5 dB higher/louder than the noise. The number of words correct is counted and a percentage from the total number of words presented is calculated. A higher percentage is better and indicates better speech intelligibility. This test will be conducted for all three hearing aid program settings.

Participants will be asked to choose between two of the hearing aid programs using an A/B comparison, on the following dimensions: clarity, speech naturalness, speech volume, noise intrusion, listening effort, overall sound quality, and preference. Participants will compare program setting 1 to program setting 2 and choose their preference for each above mentioned dimension. Additionally, participants will compare program setting 1 to program setting 3 and choose preference for each dimension. There is no better or worse, but a count will be taken of preferences for each program. Program 2 and 3 are not compared against each other as the objective of the measure is to compare programs 2 and 3 against the current default program (program 1).