Abstract
Objective
This study investigated the effects of different adjustment criteria and sound scenes on self-adjusted hearing-aid gain settings. Self-adjusted settings were evaluated for speech recognition in noise, perceived listening effort, and preference.
Design
This study evaluated a semi-supervised self-adjustment fine-tuning procedure that presents realistic everyday sound scenes in a laboratory environment, using a two-dimensional user interface, and enabling simultaneous changes in amplitude and spectral slope. While exploring the two-dimensional space of parameter settings, the hearing-aid users were instructed to optimise either listening comfort or speech understanding.
Study sample
Twenty experienced hearing aid users (median age 69.5 years) were invited to participate in this study.
Results
Adjustment criterion and sound scenes had a significant effect on preferred gain settings. No differences in signal-to-noise ratios required for 50% speech intelligibility or in the perceived listening effort were observed between the adjusted settings of the two adjustment criteria. There was a preference for the self-adjusted settings over the prescriptive first fit.
Conclusions
Listeners could reliably select their preferred gains to the two adjustment criteria and for different speech stimuli.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Iris Arweiler, Josef Chalupper and Martin Kinkel for very valuable suggestions for conducting the experiment, Sven Herrmann for conducting part of the participant tests, the Associate Editor and the reviewers for their helpful comments, and Jennifer Truempler for her English language support.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).