NCT03761927

Physiological, Behavioural and Subjective Measures of Listening Effort

Effect of Noise Reduction Algorithms on Physiological, Behavioural and Subjective Measures of Listening Effort

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 17 (actual)
• Sponsor: Sonova AG · Industry
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 99 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Participants will perform two different listening tasks: (1) listening to, and repeating back, sentence lists presented in noise, and (2) listening to short radio excerpts and answering subsequent comprehension questions. At the same time participants are required to perform a manual target-tracking task on a touch screen. During this study, continuous, non-invasive physiological measurements (heart rate, skin conductance and hemoencephalography) will be made from participants. Using this paradigm we will be assessing the effect of different hearing aid processing algorithms on listening effort. The study takes the form of a three factor (listening task x algorithm x signal-to-noise ratio), within-subjects design. Each participant performs each listening task (about 4min long each) with each algorithm (reference, noise reduction I, noise reduction II), at two signal-to-noise ratios (+4 decibel and 0 decibel) twice (test-retest).

Conditions

• Hearing Loss

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
DEVICE	Hearing Aid without NR enabled	Each participant will be fitted with noise reduction disabled. Disabled means that no sound processing algorithm that removes noise from the speech signal is active.
DEVICE	Hearing Aid with NR(1)	Each participant will be fitted with the noise reduction program on the same hearing aid. The principle of the noise reduction algorithm is to remove noise from a speech signal with the aim of improving the speech intelligibility and comfort.
DEVICE	Hearing Aid with NR(2)	Each participant will be fitted with a second noise reduction program on the same hearing aid. The parameterization of this NR algorithm differs from that in NR(1).

Timeline

• Start date: 2018-10-08
• Primary completion: 2019-03-29
• Completion: 2019-04-30
• First posted: 2018-12-03
• Last updated: 2019-07-12

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Switzerland