Authors: Lukas Jürgensen¹, Michal Fereczkowski¹, Tobias Neher¹
¹University of Southern Denmark (SDU)
Background: Hearing aid gain prescriptions are typically derived solely from the audiogram, thereby neglecting suprathreshold hearing abilities. This limitation may contribute to suboptimal aided outcomes, such as decreasing speech intelligibility (SI) at moderate to high sound levels (i.e., “rollover”). To address this issue, we previously introduced a fitting strategy called ‘sweet-spot compression’ (SSC), which aims to prevent rollover by placing speech in the area of an individual’s performance-intensity function where both SI and listening comfort are high.
Method: We extended previous work by implementing SSC on a wearable research hearing aid with optimized gain prescription, evaluating it with 17 randomly chosen hearing-impaired listeners. We collected SI scores in noise at 65- and 80-dB-SPL speech levels, and pairwise preference judgments at multiple levels in quiet and in noise.
Results: Relative to the reference condition, SSC gave better SI at both presentation levels and was clearly preferred in quiet and in noise. At the group level, rollover occurred with neither SSC nor the reference condition. At the individual level, we found fewer cases of rollover with SSC than with the reference condition.
Conclusion: SSC shows promise with respect to improving listening outcomes at moderate to high sound levels.
