Introduction
If you ask a hearing aid user when their hearing aids matter most, it is during face-to-face conversations. Despite being their top concern, communication is full of unknowns—how do we define communication difficulty? Can we measure it? Do people even realize when they are struggling to communicate? Unlike other research, this project takes a more direct approach by focusing on communication breakdowns—like when someone says, ‘Sorry, could you repeat that?’—as an objective measure of struggle. It examines how breakdowns change with background noise levels and how hearing aids influence this pattern.
Aims
This project has the following goals:
- Determine the curve of communication breakdowns for hearing aid wearers and their communication partners, including how the curve shifts with hearing loss (mild, moderate), and listening mode (unaided and aided)
- Identify the metrics that predict communication breakdowns and the morphology of the curve using measures from speech, gaze, motion, and the autonomic nervous system
Methodology
We will pair people with normal hearing and those with hearing loss to have conversations under different noise levels—levels known to trigger communication breakdowns [1]:
The hearing aid user will be positioned in the sweet spot within a 62-channel 3D loudspeaker array, while their conversation partner will experience the same background noise through open headphones. As they converse, we’ll monitor speech production, movement, gaze, and physiological responses:
[1] Miles, K., Weisser, A., Kallen, R.W. et al. Behavioral dynamics of conversation, (mis)communication and coordination in noisy environments. Sci Rep 13, 20271 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-47396-y
