The strong directional processing, which was a cue-preserving bilateral beamformer, provided additional sentence recognition benefit in realistic listening situations. Furthermore, despite reducing the interaural differences, the authors measured no significant negative consequences on listening effort or subjective preference, although it is unknown whether differences might be found using more sensitive measures. In addition, gross localization was disrupted at large eccentricities if visual cues were not present. While further study is needed, these results support consideration of this cue-preserving, bilateral beamformer technology for patients who experience difficulty with speech recognition in noise, which is not adequately addressed by conventional directional hearing aid processing.

These results provide support for the use of bilateral beamformers, even at relatively favorable SNRs and in the presence of visual cues, for listeners who demonstrate poor sentence recognition in noise.