Interaction of hearing aids with self-motion and the influence of hearing impairment

TL;DR

This study investigates how hearing impairment affects self-motion behavior and the interaction with hearing aids, revealing that hearing-impaired individuals move differently and do not adapt their self-motion in response to hearing aid algorithms, impacting performance.

Contribution

It provides novel insights into the self-motion patterns of hearing-impaired listeners and their interaction with hearing aid algorithms, which was previously underexplored.

Findings

Hearing impairment increases self-motion and estimated SNR by 0.8 dB.

Hearing-impaired participants do not adapt their self-motion in response to hearing aid algorithms.

Self-motion behavior differs significantly between hearing-impaired and normal-hearing individuals.

Abstract

When listening to a sound source in everyday-life situations, typical movement behavior can lead to a mismatch between the direction of the head and the direction of interest. This could reduce the performance of directional algorithms, as was shown in previous work for head movements of normal-hearing listeners. However, the movement behavior of hearing-impaired listeners and hearing aid users might be different, and if hearing aid users adapt their self-motion because of the directional algorithm, its performance might increase. In this work we therefore investigated the influence of hearing impairment on self-motion, and the interaction of hearing aids with self-motion. In order to do this, the self-motion of three hearing-impaired (HI) participant groups, aided with an adaptive differential microphone (ADM), aided without ADM, and unaided, was compared, also to previously measured self-motion data from younger and older normal-hearing (NH) participants. The self-motion was measured in virtual audiovisual environments (VEs) in the laboratory. Furthermore, the signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and SNR improvement of the ADM resulting from the head movements of the participants were estimated with acoustic simulations. A strong effect of hearing impairment on self-motion was found, which led to an overall increase in estimated SNR of 0.8 dB for the HI participants compared to the NH participants, and differences in estimated SNR improvement of the ADM. However, the self-motion of the HI participants aided with ADM and the other HI participants was very similar, indicating that they did not adapt their self-motion because of the ADM.