NCT03992963

Assessment of Novel Sound Changing Principles in Hearing Instruments to Determine Their Application - 2019_04

Assessment of Novel Sound Changing Principles in Hearing Instruments to Determine Their Application

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 8 (actual)
• Sponsor: Sonova AG · Industry
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 99 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Participants will take part in both a passive and active emotion recognition task: (1) passively listening to semantically-neutral sentences with emotional prosody, and (2) actively listening and subsequently categorizing emotional sentences and sounds. Participants are seated and instructed to stare at a fixation cross while the stimulus is played. During this study, non-invasive physiological measurements of pupil dilation will be recorded from the participants. Using this paradigm we will be assessing the effect of frequency lowering on emotion recognition. The study takes the form of a partly three factorial design (passive task x frequency lowering x acclimatization). Participants also perform a two factor design (active task x frequency lowering). Each participant performs two passive tests (20 minutes long each) with frequency lowering on and off, and a four week acclimatization period in-between. Participants perform one active listening task after the acclimatization period with frequency lowering on and off.

Conditions

• Hearing Loss

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
DEVICE	Hearing Aid without frequency lowering enabled	Each participant will be fitted with frequency lowering disabled. Disabled means standard hearing loss compensation without lowering higher frequencies in lower frequency areas. The input frequency is mapped to the same frequency in output.
DEVICE	Hearing Aid with frequency lowering enabled	Each participant will be fitted with frequency lowering enabled. The principle of the frequency lowering algorithm is to lower high frequencies to a lower frequency region with the aim of ensuring high frequency audibility to improve auditory emotion recognition.

Timeline

• Start date: 2019-04-08
• Primary completion: 2019-06-28
• Completion: 2019-07-26
• First posted: 2019-06-20
• Last updated: 2019-10-11

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Switzerland