Assessing the interaction between different auditory profiles and benefit from six hearing aid processing strategies: Insights from the BEAR project

The current study forms part of the Better hEAring Rehabilitation (BEAR) project, which aims to develop and evaluate new clinical tools for individual hearing loss characterization and hearing aid (HA) benefit assessment. The purpose of the current study was to assess the interaction between four different auditory profiles and two measures of hearing aid outcome obtained for six selected hearing aid processing strategies. Sixty older habitual hearing-aid users, who had previously been classified in four auditory profiles by a data-driven approach, participated in the study. All stimuli were generated with the help of a hearing aid simulator and presented via headphones. Speech recognition in noise was assessed at fixed signal-to-noise ratios based on individual 50%-correct speech reception thresholds measured in a realistic noise environment. Subjective ratings of overall quality and noise annoyance were measured using a multiple stimulus comparison paradigm. The four auditory profiles differed significantly in terms of the aided speech reception threshold (SRT) and interacted significantly with the HA processing strategies for speech recognition when target speech was presented at 90-degrees. Moreover, the correlations between the sentence recognition scores and subjective ratings differed among the auditory profiles.