Josefine Hjort

My work at Eriksholm consist of two main areas. One is recruitment and rehabilitation of test participants, and the other is planning and execution of scientific experiments in close collaboration with the researchers.

As a speech, language, and hearing pathologist, I have a big interest in helping people with communication difficulties. During my masters I found audiology to be especially interesting as it combines my interest for the more technical aspects, for instance the functionality of hearing aids, with the elements of rehabilitation, helping people with hearing impairment.

Since graduating I have had the opportunity to work both in a research and development department in a larger hearing aid manufacturing company, and in a hearing care clinic working with rehabilitation of adults with hearing loss. When I saw the job posting from Eriksholm, I immediately thought that this would be the perfect mix of both worlds that I equally enjoy. It turned out to be exactly what I had hoped for.

What especially motivates me is my great colleagues and being able to help people with hearing impairment. But also, the variety of my work, getting to know people from around the world, learning many new things every day, taking part in exciting new research projects, and working with our wonderful test participants, both in test situation and in the clinic.

Being part of research, I hope to be able to continuously contribute to improve the various concepts of hearing care we offer people with hearing impairment.

I love being creative, so I spend a lot of time on many different creative projects. This can be building (smaller) pieces of furniture, crocheting, painting, making jewelry and so on.

I think there have been many exciting scientific breakthroughs, and Artificial Intelligence is one of them. AI enables people using hearing aids to access and process more information than what has ever been possible before. We have seen and will continue to see how AI can help optimizing the listening experience and improve speech recognition and understanding for people using hearing aids.

I hope it will be possible to further improve the quality of life for people with hearing impairment, for instance by making hearing aids work even more based on individual user needs and intent.