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Hearing at the mall: Multibeam processing technology improves hearing group conversations in a real-world food court environment

2024-07-10 Article
Paula Folkeard, Niels Søgaard Jensen, Homayoun Kamkar Parsi, Sascha Bilert and Susan Scollie

American Journal of Audiology, July 10, 2024

In a study performed by researchers at the University of Western Ontario, the RealTime Conversation Enhancement (RTCE) technology implemented in the Signia Integrated Xperience (IX) hearing aids was assessed by a group of 20 participants with hearing loss. The testing was performed in a challenging real-world environment – a food court in a busy mall – where the participants rated their listening experience when being in a group conversation in the noisy surroundings. The results showed significant improvements offered by RTCE in several of the perceptual domains, which were assessed (e.g., speech understanding and listening effort), and the findings underline the importance of conducting hearing aid research in real-world settings. The real-would test environment used in this study offered a high level of ecological validity, and the study is therefore a valuable supplement to previous RTCE research done in the lab.

Read full article on American Journal of Audiology

Paula Folkeard, M.Sc., Au.D.

Paula Folkeard is a Research Manager and Audiologist at the National Centre for Audiology. She coordinates projects with the hearing aid industry through the Translational Research Unit and is a member of the Innovations in Hearing Technologies and the Hearing Aid Technologies and Outcomes Labs within the NCA. Her research interests are adult amplification, outcomes measurement, and product and procedure validation.

Niels Søgaard Jensen, M.Sc.

Niels Søgaard Jensen received his M.Sc. degree in acoustics and psychoacoustics from the Technical University of Denmark. He has a background as research engineer in the hearing aid industry where he has done research on various topics related to hearing loss and hearing aids. In 2016 he joined WS Audiology where he holds a position as Senior Evidence and Research Specialist in Lynge, Denmark.

Homayoun Kamkar Parsi, PhD

Homayoun Kamkar Parsi received his PhD degree in electrical engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada. He works in the hearing industry at WS Audiology since 2009. He is currently the Head of Signal Processing Algorithmic Research and Neural Networks. Main work, expertise and research include audio processing applications, speech enhancement, multi-microphone beamforming, source localization and tracking, own voice processing, scene analysis and towards neural networks based algorithms.

Sascha Bilert, M.Sc.

Sascha Bilert received his M.Sc. degree in engineering acoustics from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). Before his studies, he was trained and practiced as an HCP for several years. Throughout his studies Sascha worked on different topics within the hearing science domain such as auditory neuroscience. He joined the Sound & Fitting team at WS Audiology as a Research Audiologist in 2021, where his focus lies on the hearing aid platform feature optimization.

Susan Scollie, Ph.D.

Susan Scollie, Ph.D. is a Professor at Western University’s Faculty of Health Sciences, School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and is the Director of the National Centre for Audiology. She leads the team responsible for DSL who won a Governor General’s Award for being the first pediatric hearing aid prescription. Her research interests are efficacy of hearing aid signal processing, outcomes for infants, children, and adults who use hearing aids, hearing aid verification strategies, and simulation in education.