Real-World Listening Experiences Depend on Listening Intent: Insights from Ecological Momentary Assessments Combined with Heart Rate and Acoustic Data

Project: PhD Project

Project Details

Description

Laboratory tests of speech understanding are often used to assess benefit from hearing-aid (HA) fittings. However, such tests do not reflect the daily-life hearing experiences of HA users. Questionnaires can be used for that purpose, but responses may be greatly affected by memory bias. Recently, ecological momentary assessment (EMA) has emerged as a promising alternative for real-world hearing assessments. Responses are typically collected using a smartphone-based app connected to user-worn HAs that capture acoustic data. In this manner, information about the ‘auditory ecology’ of HA users, i.e. their listening environments and needs in these environments, can be obtained.
The purpose of this PhD project is to develop and test an EMA app suited for studying the auditory ecology of both paediatric and adult HA users. The app will be applied in a number of studies aimed at collecting comprehensive sets of subjective and objective real-world data with different HA fittings. The objective data will include both acoustic and physiological measurements. The real-world data will be compared to those from traditional audiological tests. It is expected that this will lead to a detailed understanding of the auditory ecology of hearing-impaired individuals and the daily-life benefit they obtain from different HA fittings.
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date01/05/202001/02/2025

Collaborative partners

  • Eriksholm Research Centre, Oticon A/S (Project partner) (lead)