Evaluating the Performance of a Visually Guided Hearing Aid Using a Dynamic Auditory-Visual Word Congruence Task.
Elin Roverud, Virginia Best, Christine R Mason and 2 others
PMID 29252977WHAT IT FOUND
Hybrid eye-gaze beamforming improved word matching over binaural cues for normal-hearing center targets and hearing-impaired side targets.
After a sudden talker switch, the first word was worse, but performance recovered by the second word.
Key findings
01Hybrid beamforming improved performance over binaural-only processing for normal-hearing listeners with center targets and hearing-impaired listeners with side targets.
02After an unpredictable target location switch, performance was lower on the first word in the visually guided beamforming conditions and recovered to fixed-target levels by the second word.
03Beamforming alone did not improve average performance over binaural-only processing, but listeners with more severe hearing loss were more likely to show a benefit.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study used a laboratory task with headphones, not a wearable hearing aid, so it does not show what a patient would hear in a real room. The head was restrained, and eye movements were the only steering cue, so real head and body movements were not tested. All target transitions were sudden and un-cued, which is more difficult than many conversations where visual or contextual cues warn of a change. The sample was small, with 10 normal-hearing and 11 hearing-impaired participants, and the hearing-impaired group was young with stable hearing loss. Eye movement timing was available for only two normal-hearing listeners because of a coding error, so the mechanism for the first-word cost is not fully established. Performance varied widely across listeners, and not every hearing-impaired listener gained from the hybrid condition. An additional normal-hearing participant was excluded because they could not perform above chance.
Declared interests
No conflicts of interest are declared by any of the authors. The article is tagged as receiving NIH extramural and U.S. Government non-PHS research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that a wearable visually guided hearing aid improves hearing in noisy conversations. The study tested simulated processing under headphones with a restrained head and no natural conversation cues, and the benefit was limited to specific groups and target positions.