On the Use of Hearing Aid Algorithms in Industrial Noise: Balancing Speech Intelligibility and Hearing Protection.
Solenn Ollivier, Fabien Bonnet, Alexis Pinsonnault-Skvarenina and 3 others
PMID 42702975WHAT IT FOUND
Listeners with hearing loss understood speech better when compression amplification was added to protection in factory noise, but it raised exposure at the lower noise level.
Adding noise reduction lowered exposure without further intelligibility change. Normal-hearing listeners showed no intelligibility benefit.
Key findings
01For participants with hearing loss, adding WDRC to compression limiting significantly improved speech reception thresholds compared with compression limiting alone.
02For participants with hearing loss, adding DNR to WDRC and compression limiting did not significantly improve speech reception thresholds compared with WDRC and compression limiting, but it significantly reduced estimated noise exposure.
03For normal-hearing participants, signal processing strategy did not significantly affect speech reception thresholds, but performance was significantly worse at 85 dBA than at 65 dBA.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample was small: 8 participants with hearing loss and 10 with normal hearing, and recruitment of workers with hearing loss was difficult. The device was tested only through receivers in a laboratory, not as a fitted hearing protection device with its passive earplug pathway. Only one industrial noise was used, a wood-working factory noise, so the results cannot be generalized to all industrial noise. Noise exposure was estimated from short sentences, not from a full 8-hour workday. Subjective ratings used two single-sentence questions, so they do not fully capture listening effort or sound quality. The compression limiting threshold was adapted for occupational protection, which may change speech intelligibility compared with typical hearing aid use. The hearing loss group had mild to moderate loss, so results may not apply to severe loss.
Declared interests
The work was funded by the Institut de Recherche Robert-Sauvé en santé et sécurité du travail (IRSST). The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as showing that hearing aids are safe for workers in industrial noise. The study tested a research platform in a laboratory with short sentence stimuli, one wood-working noise, and no passive earplug pathway, and it did not estimate full-day exposure.