Skip to content
  • Projects
  • Publications
  • News
  • About us
    • Our team
    • Students
    • History
    • Partnerships
    • Contact us
Menu
  • Projects
  • Publications
  • News
  • About us
    • Our team
    • Students
    • History
    • Partnerships
    • Contact us
  • Projects
  • Publications
  • News
  • About us
    • Our team
    • Students
    • History
    • Partnerships
    • Contact us
Menu
  • Projects
  • Publications
  • News
  • About us
    • Our team
    • Students
    • History
    • Partnerships
    • Contact us
Back

PUPILS: Evaluation of pupillometry as a diagnostic tool for hearing-aid fitting

Dorothea Wendt

Principal Scientist

Eriksholm Research Centre

PUPILS

Introduction

Hearing loss not only reduces audibility but also impairs speech comprehension and increases cognitive demands during listening. This can harm communication skills and have severe psychosocial consequences, which include increased levels of mental distress and fatigue, and a lack of energy and stress-related sick leave from work. It is therefore crucial to provide rehabilitation techniques that adequately address the problems that people with hearing loss face in everyday communication.

Recently, pupil dilation has been proposed to indicate levels of listening effort during speech comprehension in noisy environments. In auditory research, pupillometry is applied to assess how listening effort is influenced by various relevant factors, including interfering background noise, hearing loss, and hearing aid sound processing. However, most studies linking pupil dilation to listening effort rely on data averaged across listeners and not many attempts have been made to evaluate pupillometry as a reliable marker of individual’s effort investment.

This project is supported by the William Demant Foundation by funding one PhD candidate.

Aims

This project aimed to evaluate the feasibility of pupillometry as a reliable marker of listening effort within individual listeners by assessing the sensitivity and specificity of the pupillary method using a speech-in-noise listening test.

The work was performed at DTU in collaboration with Professor Torsten Dau and Assistant Professor Abigail Kressner from Hearing Systems as well as Associate Professor Per Bækgaard (DTU Compute).

The work of Mihaela Neagu, Helia Relaño-Iborra and Kirsten Jensen was supported by the foundation.

PUPILS - Tests

Methodology

One work-package examined the reliability of the method throughout a longitudinal study for people with normal hearing as well as for people with hearing impairment to identify the variance of the individual pupil responses assessed in a speech-in-noise test over a period of time. Several individual factors, such as hearing and cognitive abilities, were assessed in order to better understand how those listener-specific factors affect the Pupil Dilation Response.

In another work package, advanced analysis methods were applied to assess and model the pupillary responses and to classify individual pupil traces. The aim is to identify models that are clinically feasible for analysis on an individual basis using a few or even single pupil traces.

Results

Findings suggest that pupillometry demonstrates potential of being clinically applied to assess individuals’ listening effort. Depending on the test conditions, reliable pupil features can be obtained, which is a prerequisite of a clinically feasible method. However, individual factors including fatigue and motivation, contribute to the variability in the pupil response and need to be considered when interpreting the data.

In addition, newer approaches give strong indication that individuals’ single pupil traces can be linked to their exerted effort. However, preprocessing of the pupil data was key to separate listeners and conditions for which a reliable classification was not possible.

Overall, this work can provide a valuable basis for developing a clinical tool to assess listening effort, which will facilitate more comprehensive evaluations of speech communication that extend beyond audibility and speech intelligibility.

Publications

Loading...
Ph.D. thesis Neagu M B. Evaluation of pupillometry as a diagnostic tool 2022.
Neagu M B, Kressner A A, Relaño-Iborra H, Bækgaard P, Dau T, Wendt D. Investigating the Reliability of Pupillometry as a Measure of Individualized Listening Effort. Published in Sage Journals 2023.
Iborra H R, Wendt D, Neagu M B, Kressner A A, Dau T, Bækgaard P. Baseline pupil size encodes task-related information and modulates the task-evoked response in a speech-in-noise task. Published in Trends in hearing. 2022.

Team

Dorothea Wendt

Principal Scientist

Eriksholm Research Centre

Mihaela Neagu

Student

Technical University of Denmark

Kirsten Jensen

Research assistant

Technical University of Denmark - Hearing Systems

Torsten Dau

Professor

DTU Hearing Systems

Abigail Anne Kressner

Assistant Professor

DTU Health Tech

Helia Relaño-Iborra

Postdoc

Technical University of Denmark - Hearing Systems

Per Bækgaard

Associate Professor

Technical University of Denmark - Cognitive Systems

View all

Partners

  • Hearing Systems section, Department of Health Technology – Technical University of Denmark 

  • DTU Compute – Cognitive systems

You may also be interested in

Loading...
Alfi - Laboratory tests
CURRENT
Assessment of Listening-related Fatigue in Daily- Life (ALFi)
3008,1037,10303,10579

Cognitive hearing effort compensation, Personalized audiology

Hearing loss can have significant consequences beyond a reduction in audibility. For example, greate...
Hearing loss can have significant consequences beyond a reduction in audibility. For example, greater levels…
Ecophysiology of Hearing 
CURRENT
Ecophysiology of Hearing 
10303

Personalized audiology

It is currently not possible to objectively measure and evaluate hearing outcomes in daily life. Th...
It is currently not possible to objectively measure and evaluate hearing outcomes in daily…
LISTEN
FINALIZED
Listening Effort in the European population: a New innovative programme of research and training (LISTEN)
3008

Cognitive hearing effort compensation

Hearing impairment is a leading cause of disability worldwide. As people age, their hearing ability ...
Hearing impairment is a leading cause of disability worldwide. As people age, their hearing ability…
Neurophysiological measures of attention capture  
CURRENT
Neurophysiological measures of attention capture  
4373,3008

Cognitive hearing effort compensation

Our brain is constantly scanning the environment for potentially relevant information outside our cu...
Our brain is constantly scanning the environment for potentially relevant information outside our current focus…

You may also be interested in

Alfi - Laboratory tests
CURRENT
Assessment of Listening-related Fatigue in Daily- Life (ALFi)
3008,1037,10303,10579

Cognitive hearing effort compensation, Personalized audiology

Hearing loss can have significant consequences beyond a reduction in audibility. For example, greate...
Hearing loss can have significant consequences beyond a reduction in audibility. For example, greater levels…
Ecophysiology of Hearing 
CURRENT
Ecophysiology of Hearing 
10303

Personalized audiology

It is currently not possible to objectively measure and evaluate hearing outcomes in daily life. Th...
It is currently not possible to objectively measure and evaluate hearing outcomes in daily…
LISTEN
FINALIZED
Listening Effort in the European population: a New innovative programme of research and training (LISTEN)
3008

Cognitive hearing effort compensation

Hearing impairment is a leading cause of disability worldwide. As people age, their hearing ability ...
Hearing impairment is a leading cause of disability worldwide. As people age, their hearing ability…
Neurophysiological measures of attention capture  
CURRENT
Neurophysiological measures of attention capture  
4373,3008

Cognitive hearing effort compensation

Our brain is constantly scanning the environment for potentially relevant information outside our cu...
Our brain is constantly scanning the environment for potentially relevant information outside our current focus…

People are our most
valuable source of
insights

Facebook

Instagram

LinkedIn

Youtube

  • Eriksholm Research Centre
  • Rørtangvej 20
  • DK-3070 Snekkersten
  • Denmark
We are a part of Oticon, a world leader in hearing care. We share the same philosophy that people are our main source of insights
Bliv testperson
  • +45 48 29 89 00
  • mail@eriksholm.com
  • Cookie policy
  • Disclaimer

© 2023 Eriksholm – Designed by Aveo web&marketing

Manage consent to cookies
We use cookies to optimize our website and our service.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service expressly requested by the subscriber or user, or solely for the purpose of transmitting a communication via an electronic communication network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is necessary to create user profiles for the purpose of sending advertisements or to track the user on a website or across multiple websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage {vendor_count} vendors Read more about these purposes
Preferences
{title} {title} {title}