Investigation of hearing aid users'speech understanding in noise and their spectral-temporal resolution skills

Purpose:Our study aims to compare speech understanding in noise and spectral-temporal resolution skills with regard to the degree of hearing loss,age,hearing aid use experience and gender of hearing aid users.Methods:Our study included sixty-eight hearing aid users aged between 40-70 years,with bilateral mild and moderate symmetrical sensorineural hearing loss.Random gap detection test,Turkish matrix test and spectral-temporally modulated ripple test were implemented on the participants with bilateral hearing aids.The test results acquired were compared statistically according to different variables and the correlations were examined.Results:No statistically significant differences were observed for speech-in-noise recognition,spectraltemporal resolution among older and younger adults in hearing aid users(p>0.05).There wasn’t found a statistically significant difference among test outcomes as regards different hearing loss degrees(p>0.05).Higher performances were obtained in terms of temporal resolution in male participants and participants with more hearing aid use experience(p<0.05).Significant correlations were obtained between the results of speech-in-noise recognition,temporal resolution and spectral resolution tests performed with hearing aids(p<0.05).Conclusion:Our study findings emphasized the importance of regular hearing aid use and it showed that some auditory skills can be improved with hearing aids.Observation of correlations among the speechin-noise recognition,temporal resolution and spectral resolution tests have revealed that these skills should be evaluated as a whole to maximize the patient’s communication abilities.

Evaluation of Digits-in-Noise Test and Hearing Handicap Inventory for Adults Screening in Patients with Occupational Noise-Induced Hearing Loss

Objective:To explore the clinical evaluation role of the Digits-in-Noise(DIN)test and Hearing Handicap Inventory for Adults Screening(HHIA-S)for patients with occupational noise-induced hearing loss and to observe and analyze their application values.Methods:Fifty patients with suspected occupational noise-induced hearing loss were randomly selected from the Department of Otolaryngology at the hospital as the research target.The collection period for the research cases spanned from January 2022 to November 2023,and all patients had a history of noise exposure.The DIN test and HHIA-S were used for hearing examinations,with clinical,comprehensive diagnosis serving as the gold standard to study their diagnostic performance.Results:The compliance rate of the DIN test was 88.00%,the HHIA-S’s compliance rate was 80.00%,and the combined compliance rate was 94.00%.The compliance rate of the DIN test and the combined compliance rates of the patients were statistically significant compared to the clinical gold standard data(P<0.05),while there was no difference between the compliance rate of the HHIA-S and the gold standard(P>0.05).The data shows that the sensitivity of the combined diagnosis is significantly higher than the sensitivity data of the DIN test and HHIA-S examination alone(P<0.05).Its specificity is 100.00%,and the accuracy data of the joint diagnosis in the degree were higher than those of the DIN test alone(P>0.05)and the HHIA-S alone(P<0.05).Conclusion:For patients with occupational noise-induced hearing loss,the joint evaluation of the DIN test and HHIA-S can significantly improve their diagnostic value with high sensitivity and accuracy.

Acceptable noise level as a deciding factor for prescribing hearing aids for older adults with cochlear hearing loss-A scoping review

Older adults often find it difficult to perceive speech, especially in noisy conditions. Though hearing aid is one of the rehabilitative devices available to older adults to alleviate hearing loss, some of them may experience annoyance through hearing aid and hence reject it, may be due to circuitry noise and/or background noise. Acceptable noise level is a direct behavioural measure to estimate the extent of how much a person is able to put up with noise while simultaneously listening to speech. Acceptable noise level is a central auditory measure and it is not influenced by age, gender, presentation level or speaker. Using this measure, we can quantify the annoyance level experienced by an individual. This in-formation is of utmost importance and caution should be paid before setting the parameters in hearing aid, especially for those who are unable to accept noise. In this review article, an attempt has been made to document how to optimize the hearing aid program by setting parameters such as noise reduction circuit, microphone sensitivity and gain. These adjustments of parameters might help to reduce rejection rate of hearing aids, especially in those individuals who are annoyed by background noise. Copyright ? 2015 The Authors. Production & hosting by Elsevier (Singapore) Pte Ltd On behalf of PLA General Hospital Department of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Refinement of Enhanced Speech Using Hybrid-Median Filter and Harmonic Regeneration Approach

This study proposes a post-processor to improve the harmonic structure of a vowel in an enhanced speech, enabling the speech quality to be improved. Initially, a speech enhancement algorithm is employed to reduce the background noise for a noisy speech. Hence the enhanced speech is post-processed by a hybrid-median filter to reduce the musical effect of residual noise. Since the harmonic spectra are impacted by background noise and a speech enhancement process, the quality of a vowel is deteriorated. A harmonic regenerated method is developed to improve the quality of post-processed speech. Experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the quality of post-processed speech by adequately regenerating harmonic spectra.

ANNOYANCE AND SPEECH INTERFERENCE OF IMPULSE AND TRAFFIC NOISE

By using the modernly developed techniques of possibility and set-valued statistics, this paper determined the thresholds of various categories of noise annoyance and defined the dose-response relation between the levels of noise and their annoyance. Three factors controlled in the experiment were types of noise: impulse and traffic; level of noise: 5Leq from 45 - 85 dB (A); and performance task: with and without speech recognition. Noise interference with speech recognition was measured with the SDT method. Our ex-perimental results showed that Leq of impulse noise should be higher than that of traffic noise to get equal annoyance; the speech recognition task might lighten the experience of annoyance; the higher the level of noise, the more its interference with the speech recognition, that is. the less the value of d '.

A coherent method for finding arrival directions of speech signals and its application for noise reduction in microphone array

The research on finding the arrival directions of speech signals by microphone arrny is proposed. We first analyze the uniform microphone array and give the design for microphone array applied in the hand-free speech recognition. Combining the traditional direction finding technique of MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC) with the focusing matrix method, we improve the resolving power of the microphone array for multiple speech sources.As one application of finding Direction of Arrival (DOA), a new microphone-array system for noise reduction is proposed. The new system is based on maximum likelihood estimate technique which reconstruct superimposed signals from different directions by using DOA information. The DOA information is got in terms of focusing MUSIC method which has been proven to have high performance than conventional MUSIC method on speaker localization[1].