Audiologist-Supervised Self-Fitting Fine Tuning of Hearing Aids

Research into auditory movement perception has been furthered by the availability of tools for creating realistic virtual environments. In a previous headphone-based study, we used such a tool for investigating the influence of different (simulated) hearing aid algorithms on auditory source movement perception (Lundbeck et al., 2017). For a group of elderly hearing-impaired (EHI) listeners, we found that two multi-microphone signal enhancement algorithms could substantially improve the detectability of left-right and near-far source movements in the presence of reverberation and interfering sounds. In the current study, we followed up on this by carrying out corresponding measurements with a loudspeaker-based setup and head-worn hearing aids. We bilaterally fitted a group of 15 EHI listeners with behind-the-ear devices that were programmed to have different settings that varied in spatial selectivity. Apart from measurements of source movement detectability, we used a new method for assessing spatial awareness perception in a realistic environment. Using a street scene with up to five sound sources, the participants had to either count the number of presented sources or indicate the direction of a moving source. In this contribution, we will present the results of the different measurements and discuss the influence of directional processing algorithms on spatial awareness perception.