Evaluating Benefits of Hearing Aid Microphone Directionality Technologies

Participant describes an acoustically noisy environment in which recorded speech is played from a speaker directly in front of the participant and recorded multi-talker babble is played from multiple speakers around the participant. The participant uses a slider tool to choose if scene sounds acoustically wide (hearing all noise and speech), or acoustically narrow (hearing more of the speech than the noise). The range of the slider is 0-100, with 0 indicating the sound scene is "wide" and 100 indicating the sound scene is "narrow". The slider moves in 5 point increments. This is a purely subjective description and there is no better or worse outcome.

Participant describes an acoustically noisy environment in which recorded speech is played from a speaker directly in front of the participant and recorded multi-talker babble is played from multiple speakers around the participant. The participant uses a slider tool to choose if scene sounds acoustically wide (hearing all noise and speech), or acoustically narrow (hearing more of the speech than the noise). The range of the slider is 0-100, with 0 indicating the sound scene is "wide" and 100 indicating the sound scene is "narrow". The slider moves in 5 point increments. This is a purely subjective description and there is no better or worse outcome.

Using a sliding scale, the participant chooses their preference for listening to the sound scene, however this time, 0 indicates "not preferred" and 100 indicates "most preferred". The slider moves in 5 point increments. This is purely subjective and there is no better or worse answer.

Using a sliding scale, the participant chooses their preference for listening to the sound scene, however this time, 0 indicates "not preferred" and 100 indicates "most preferred". The slider moves in 5 point increments.

Objective measure of speech reception thresholds with all three microphone settings (DIR1,DIR2,DIR3). This is calculated as the Signal to Noise Ratio at which participant can correctly repeat 50% of the words. A negative number (i.e. -10) indicates that the participant correctly repeated 50% of the words when the speech signal was softer or lower than the noise level. For example, an SNR score of -10 means that the the participant correctly repeated 50% of the words when the speech signal was 10 dB softer than the noise level. In this case, the noise level was appropriate to the microphone setting, i.e., DIR1 was tested in softer noise and DIR2 and DIR3 were tested in loud noise.

Participants made adjustments of microphone directionality via an app, in real world listening situations. When participants adjusted the microphone directionality in real-time, they were also prompted via ecological momentary assessment to rate how satisfied they were with the adjustment. Participants chose one of three satisfaction ratings: no, slight, or clear. "Clear" satisfaction would be the best rating, indicating high satisfaction, "no" would be the worst rating, indicating no satisfaction, and "slight" would indicate somewhat satisfied.

Participants listen to different samples of transition speed from one mic setting to another in an A/B comparison and rate which sample is more noticeable, i.e. A is more noticeable than B, A is less noticeable than B, or A and B are the same. No statistical analysis was done for this outcome measure. Frequency distribution was completed to record the number of responses in which participants rated a 0 second transition time more noticeable than a 2s, 4s, and 8s transition time.