Emerging technologies with potential for objectively evaluating speech recognition skills

Abstract

Work-related exposure to noise and other ototoxins can cause damage to the cochlea, synapses between the inner hair cells, the auditory nerve fibers, and higher auditory pathways, leading to difficulties in recognizing speech. Procedures designed to determine speech recognition scores (SRS) in an objective manner can be helpful in disability compensation cases where the worker claims to have poor speech perception due to exposure to noise or ototoxins. Such measures can also be helpful in determining SRS in individuals who cannot provide reliable responses to speech stimuli, including patients with Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain injuries, and infants with and without hearing loss. Cost-effective neural monitoring hardware and software is being rapidly refined due to the high demand for neurogaming (games involving the use of brain-computer interfaces), health, and other applications. More specifically, two related advances in neuro-technology include relative ease in recording neural activity and availability of sophisticated analysing techniques. These techniques are reviewed in the current article and their applications for developing objective SRS procedures are proposed. Issues related to neuroaudioethics (ethics related to collection of neural data evoked by auditory stimuli including speech) and neurosecurity (preservation of a person’s neural mechanisms and free will) are also discussed.

Key Words:

• Speech processing
• speech recognition scores
• neural networks
• stimulus reconstruction
• neuroaudioethics
• neurosecurity
• electroencephalography
• magnetoencephalography
• auditory evoked potentials
• auditory evoked fields

Acknowledgements

A preliminary version of the technical report was presented at annual convention of the 40th National Hearing Conservation Association: Celebrating Hearing Loss Prevention. [Rawool, V.W. (2015). Future Trends in Objective Evaluation of Speech Recognition Ability [Abstract]. National Hearing Conservation Association Spectrum 3, Supplement 1, 46. (New Orleans, USA; February 20, 2015). Podium presentation]. The author thanks an anonymous reviewer, and Drs. Colleen Le Prell and Marjorie Grantham for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Declaration of interest

The author reports no conflict of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing of the paper.