Effects of Binaural Spatialization in Wireless Microphone Systems for Hearing Aids on Normal-Hearing and Hearing-Impaired Listeners.
Gilles Courtois, Hervé Lissek, Philippe Estoppey and 2 others
PMID 29457537WHAT IT FOUND
For hearing aid users with moderate or severe loss, adding spatial cues to a wireless microphone system improved speech understanding when the microphone signal was used alone; it failed to help normal-hearing or profound-loss users, and normal-hearing localization was worse in the tested setup.
Key findings
01Spatialization improved speech understanding for listeners with moderate or severe hearing loss when the wireless microphone signal was presented alone, but not for normal-hearing listeners or those with profound hearing loss.
02When the wireless microphone signal was mixed with hearing-aid microphone sound, spatialization significantly improved speech understanding only for the moderate hearing-loss group.
03Normal-hearing listeners localized significantly worse in the wireless-microphone-only configuration than unaided, while hearing-loss groups showed no significant difference across configurations.
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How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
This was a laboratory study with 10 people in each group, and only 6 of the 10 profound-loss listeners completed the speech-understanding test. The feature was tested with artificial noise and no lip reading, while many severe and profound listeners said lip reading is important in daily life. The hearing aids kept each user's usual dynamic and frequency compression, so the effect of those settings could not be separated. The spatialization used generic filters and a coarse five-sector resolution, and normal-hearing listeners were not used to hearing aids with closed ears, so localization results may not reflect real use. Individual responses varied widely: some profound listeners did worse with spatialization, and half of the hearing-impaired subjects localized better without hearing aids. The study did not test everyday listening situations or clinical outcomes.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that binaural spatialization helps all hearing aid users. The tested setup included hearing aids, a wireless microphone, and sometimes hearing-aid microphones, and the benefit was limited to some hearing-loss groups. Normal-hearing localization was worse in the tested setup.