NCT04167735

Assessment of Novel Sound Changing Principles in Hearing Instruments to Determine Their Application - 2019_33

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

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 18 (actual)
• Sponsor: Sonova AG · Industry
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 99 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

Participants will complete a listening task in a simulated reverberant environment. Participants are seated and instructed to look at a fixation cross while a sentence is played. Sentences are varied with respect to their speech rate. While listening to the sentences participant's pupil dilation is measured by means of pupillometry which is a non-invasive physiological measurement. Participants are asked to repeat back the sentences loud. At fixed intervals, subjective ratings are collected by asking participants to move an on-screen slider using a game controller. Two hearing aid programs will be compared, one intended for speech perception in quiet and the other to reduce reverberation in reverberant environments. The study is designed as factorial, with 2 speech rates, 2 room simulations and 2 hearing aid programs. The same conditions will be re-tested once after a minimum of one day. A pilot study will determine appropriate speech rates by applying a different factorial, with 4 speech rates, 2 room simulations and 1 hearing aid program. Participants complete all conditions (within-subjects) in one experimental sessions that lasts around 1 hour.

Conditions

• Hearing Loss

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
DEVICE	Hearing Aid without Reverberation Canceller (RevC).	Each participant will be fitted with the 2 different Sound Changing principles on the same hearing aid, saved to 2 manual programs (ensures exact same hearing loss compensation for each intervention). Reverberation Canceller principle is a sound processing algorithm to remove reverberation from a speech signal to improve the speech intelligibility and comfort. The active comparator condition is without Reverberation Canceller principle enabled.
DEVICE	Hearing Aid Reverberation Canceller enabled (RevC_1)	Each participant will be fitted with the 2 different Sound Changing principles on the same hearing aid, saved to 2 manual programs (ensures exact same hearing loss compensation for each intervention). Reverberation Canceller principle is a sound processing algorithm to remove reverberation from a speech signal to improve the speech intelligibility and comfort. The experimental condition applies the Reverberation Canceller and is predicted to provide a benefit in reverberant room simulations.

Timeline

• Start date: 2019-10-22
• Primary completion: 2019-12-12
• Completion: 2019-12-12
• First posted: 2019-11-19
• Last updated: 2019-12-16

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Switzerland