Official Conference Partner: Interacoustics

Søren Laugesen, Ph.D., Research Manager at the Interacoustics Research Unit (IRU)

Get a sneak peek behind the scenes of IRU and learn about some of our research outcomes: the CE-Chirp and Aided Corticals

The Interacoustics Research Unit was formed ten years ago, with a mission to translate basic research in technical audiology and hearing science into solving real-world challenges faced by audiologists, ENTs, and hearing healthcare professionals. This is done in a combination of internal research projects and collaborative projects with external partners. Two examples – both in the domain of evoked responses – will be discussed. The first considers the CE-Chirp, the level-specific and the narrow-band (NB) versions of it, as well as ongoing research into band-interaction effects when stimulating with all four NB CE-Chirps at both ears of the patient. The second example considers using evoked cortical responses as a means of validating hearing-aid fittings in infants. This project was made in collaboration with the University of Manchester and will be known to many as the ‘Ladies in the Van’ project.

11.55am –
12.25pm

Søren Laugesen, Ph.D., Research Manager at the Interacoustics Research Unit

ACT is a new diagnostic tool to estimate a patient’s hearing-in-noise ability from a simple, quick, and non-language specific test

This contribution presents evidence from a series of studies that has matured research versions of spectro-temporal modulation sensitivity testing into a clinically viable tool: The Audible Contrast Threshold (ACT) test. Over the last decade, ACT and earlier measures of spectro-temporal modulation sensitivity have shown high predictive power over speech-in-noise performance in several research studies with aided hearing-impaired test subjects. ACT is clinically interesting, as upfront knowledge about a prospective hearing-aid user’s realistic speech-in-noise performance can be useful for individualising the hearing aids’ help-in-noise features and can contribute to more targeted patient counselling. Among the important novelties are that ACT stimuli are shaped according to the individual audiogram to ensure audibility throughout the frequency range of interest, a unique test procedure very similar to that of the pure-tone audiogram, and particularly promising results when the speech-in-noise comparison data were obtained with hearing aids in a complex “ecologically valid” test condition including speech maskers and reverberation. With ACT, audiologists and hearing healthcare professionals can finally address the hearing-aid user’s #1 complaint: hearing in noise.