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Effect of Hearing Aid Directionality and Remote Microphone on Speech Intelligibility in Complex Listening Situations

Remote microphones (RMs) have been developed to support hearing aid (HA) users in understanding distant talkers. In traditional clinical applications, a drawback of these systems is the deteriorated speech intelligibility in the near field. This study investigates advantages and disadvantages of cli...

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Autores principales: Wagener, Kirsten C., Vormann, Matthias, Latzel, Matthias, Mülder, Hans E.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6194921/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30322342
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2331216518804945
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author Wagener, Kirsten C.
Vormann, Matthias
Latzel, Matthias
Mülder, Hans E.
author_facet Wagener, Kirsten C.
Vormann, Matthias
Latzel, Matthias
Mülder, Hans E.
author_sort Wagener, Kirsten C.
collection PubMed
description Remote microphones (RMs) have been developed to support hearing aid (HA) users in understanding distant talkers. In traditional clinical applications, a drawback of these systems is the deteriorated speech intelligibility in the near field. This study investigates advantages and disadvantages of clinical RM usage and the effects of different directionality settings of the HAs in complex listening situations in the laboratory. Speech intelligibility was investigated in 15 experienced severely hearing impaired participants in a noisy environment using a dual-task test paradigm where the tasks were presented from either a near field or a far field loudspeaker. Primary and secondary tasks were presented simultaneously so attention had to be shared on both tasks. In a second experiment, two speech intelligibility tests were presented from either the near field or the far field loudspeaker. The tests were interleaved to simulate a complex listening situation with shifting attention. Directional HA microphones yielded better performance than omnidirectional microphones (both combined with a RM) in near field when analyzing both tasks of the dual-task experiment separately. Furthermore, the integrated dual-task test results showed better performance with directional HA microphones compared with the omnidirectional setting (both cases in combination with a RM). These findings were confirmed by the results of the interleaved speech intelligibility test.
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spelling pubmed-61949212018-10-22 Effect of Hearing Aid Directionality and Remote Microphone on Speech Intelligibility in Complex Listening Situations Wagener, Kirsten C. Vormann, Matthias Latzel, Matthias Mülder, Hans E. Trends Hear ISAAR Special Issue: Original Article Remote microphones (RMs) have been developed to support hearing aid (HA) users in understanding distant talkers. In traditional clinical applications, a drawback of these systems is the deteriorated speech intelligibility in the near field. This study investigates advantages and disadvantages of clinical RM usage and the effects of different directionality settings of the HAs in complex listening situations in the laboratory. Speech intelligibility was investigated in 15 experienced severely hearing impaired participants in a noisy environment using a dual-task test paradigm where the tasks were presented from either a near field or a far field loudspeaker. Primary and secondary tasks were presented simultaneously so attention had to be shared on both tasks. In a second experiment, two speech intelligibility tests were presented from either the near field or the far field loudspeaker. The tests were interleaved to simulate a complex listening situation with shifting attention. Directional HA microphones yielded better performance than omnidirectional microphones (both combined with a RM) in near field when analyzing both tasks of the dual-task experiment separately. Furthermore, the integrated dual-task test results showed better performance with directional HA microphones compared with the omnidirectional setting (both cases in combination with a RM). These findings were confirmed by the results of the interleaved speech intelligibility test. SAGE Publications 2018-10-16 /pmc/articles/PMC6194921/ /pubmed/30322342 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2331216518804945 Text en © The Author(s) 2018 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle ISAAR Special Issue: Original Article
Wagener, Kirsten C.
Vormann, Matthias
Latzel, Matthias
Mülder, Hans E.
Effect of Hearing Aid Directionality and Remote Microphone on Speech Intelligibility in Complex Listening Situations
title Effect of Hearing Aid Directionality and Remote Microphone on Speech Intelligibility in Complex Listening Situations
title_full Effect of Hearing Aid Directionality and Remote Microphone on Speech Intelligibility in Complex Listening Situations
title_fullStr Effect of Hearing Aid Directionality and Remote Microphone on Speech Intelligibility in Complex Listening Situations
title_full_unstemmed Effect of Hearing Aid Directionality and Remote Microphone on Speech Intelligibility in Complex Listening Situations
title_short Effect of Hearing Aid Directionality and Remote Microphone on Speech Intelligibility in Complex Listening Situations
title_sort effect of hearing aid directionality and remote microphone on speech intelligibility in complex listening situations
topic ISAAR Special Issue: Original Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6194921/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30322342
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2331216518804945
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