NCT01950013

At-home Auditory Training Clinical Trial

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 45 (actual)
• Sponsor: Indiana University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 55 Years – 79 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of an auditory training program used at home with the subject's own hearing aids.

Detailed description

The most common communication complaint of older adults with impaired hearing is that they can hear speech, but can't understand it. This is especially true where there are competing sounds in the background. Previous experiments performed under laboratory settings using a novel word-based auditory-training regimen have demonstrated substantial improvements in open-set recognition of words and sentences in noise. The current proposed study will investigate the effectiveness of the training regimen when used in a patient's home setting with their own hearing aids. All testing for the screening, baseline speech testing, training system orientation, and the outcomes portions of this project will be conducted in the Audiology Research Laboratory (ARL) of the Speech and Hearing Center located at 200 South Jordan Avenue. The use of the training program will be done at the subject's home. Subjects will first come to the ARL for either one session for a hearing aid follow-up and instruction in the use of the training system (Session 1) or for one session for an initial screening to determine eligibility (Screening) followed then by Session 1. Subjects will then take home a training system that includes a tablet computer that has the training program loaded onto it, a portable loudspeaker, and some accessories. There will be three groups of subjects: (1) Hearing aid alone--no training (passive control); (2) Hearing aid plus auditory training (training); and (3) Hearing aid plus audio book use (active control). Total enrollment will be 45 subjects. Those subjects in the training group and active control group will complete a 6-week training period and return to the lab for outcome measures after 6 weeks of training for the primary and secondary outcome measures. The hearing aid alone group will return for the same outcome measures as the training and active control groups, but will have no intervention between these follow-up sessions.

Conditions

• Presbycusis
• Aging
• Hearing Loss

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Auditory training program	Previous experiments performed under laboratory settings using a novel word-based auditory-training regimen have demonstrated substantial improvements in open-set recognition of words and sentences in noise. The current proposed study will investigate the effectiveness of the training regimen when used in a patient's home setting with their own hearing aids.
BEHAVIORAL	Sham Comparator: Active Control	This is a sham intervention in which the patient listens to audio books following the same regimen as the patients receiving the auditory training.

Timeline

• Start date: 2013-07-01
• Primary completion: 2015-02-01
• Completion: 2015-02-01
• First posted: 2013-09-25
• Last updated: 2019-07-16
• Results posted: 2019-07-02

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States