A clinical test battery for Better hEAring Rehabilitation (BEAR): Towards the prediction of individual auditory deficits and hearing-aid benefit

One aim of the Better hEAring Rehabilitation (BEAR) project is to define a new clinical profiling tool, a test battery, for individualized hearing loss characterization. Recently, Sanchez-Lopez et al. (2019) proposed a test battery that includes six types of measures: audibility, middle-ear analysis, speech perception, binaural-processing abilities, loudness perception, and spectro-temporal resolution. The results of 75 listeners were analyzed using a data-driven approach (Sanchez-Lopez et al., 2018), which provided evidence for the existence of two independent sources of distortion and four different auditory profiles. The classification of the listeners into auditory profiles allows the prediction of the performance of the listeners on different psychoacoustic tasks as well as their expected aided speech intelligibility. For clinical practice, a decision tree with a small set of highly predictive tests is desirable for an efficient classification of hearing-impaired individuals. The main aim of the present study was to investigate the optimal decision tree and to propose a clinically feasible test battery with a minimum number of tests for accurate listener classification. The clinical test battery will be used in a large-scale field study that will help implement a hearing-aid fitting protocol for better hearing rehabilitation.