Introduction
Hearing loss impacts our ability to communicate with others. This communication difficulty can manifest itself in a variety of behavior changes like louder speech, or in physiological stress markers like increased heart rate variability. Yet we are still working to understand communication difficulty in a comprehensive manner. In this project we aim to study how behavior in hearing impaired participants as well as their interlocutors change as the effort required to hold a conversation increases. Our goal is to study these processes in a laboratory as well as in real-life settings.
Aims
In this project we aim to understand compensatory behaviors as well as physiological markers that indicate a person is having difficulty in communicating. Indicators of communication difficulty have been shown in laboratory settings.
We now aim to move our studies from the laboratory to the field to better understand how communication difficulty can be assessed in real life settings.
Methodology
Previous experiments have looked at pairs of participants with different hearing abilities completing an interactive task in a laboratory setting. We will build on this setting by isolating behavior changes and stress markers found in the previous experiment. We will then investigate how we could assess these measures in real life settings rather than a laboratory.
