The results of this study indicate that use of a wireless HAT improves word recognition over the mobile telephone in quiet and in noise relative to performance in the acoustic mobile telephone condition for a group of adult cochlear implant recipients.

Each remote microphone system improved sentence recognition in noise, but greater improvement was obtained with the digital adaptive system. The Listening in Spatialized Noise–Sentence Test Prescribed Gain Amplifier may serve as a good indicator of benefit from remote microphone technology.

Use of the adaptive noise management technologies evaluated in this study improves school-age children's speech recognition in noise for signals arriving from the front. Although a small decrement in speech recognition in noise was observed for signals arriving from behind the listener, most participants reported a preference for use of noise management technology both when the signal arrived from in front and from behind the child. The results of this study suggest that adaptive noise management technologies should be considered for use with school-age children when listening in academic and social situations.

Children with hearing loss often experience difficulty understanding speech in noisy and reverberant classrooms. Traditional remote microphone use, in which the teacher wears a remote microphone that captures her speech and wirelessly delivers it to radio receivers coupled to a child’s hearing aids, is often ineffective for small-group listening and learning activities. A potential solution is to place a remote microphone in the middle of the desk used for small-group learning situations to capture the speech of the peers around the desk and wirelessly deliver the speech to the child’s hearing aids.The objective of this study was to compare speech recognition of children using hearing aids across three conditions: (1) hearing aid in an omnidirectional microphone mode (HA-O), (2) hearing aid with automatic activation of a directional microphone (HA-ADM) (i.e., the hearing aid automatically switches in noisy environments from omnidirectional mode to a directional mode with a cardioid polar plot pattern), and (3) HA-ADM with simultaneous use of a remote microphone (RM) in a “Small Group” mode (HA-ADM-RM). The Small Group mode is designed to pick up multiple near-field talkers. An additional objective of this study was to compare the subjective listening preferences of children between the HA-ADM and HA-ADM-RM conditions.A single-group, repeated measures design was used to evaluate performance differences obtained in the three technology conditions. Sentence recognition in noise was assessed in a classroom setting with each technology, while sentences were presented at a fixed level from three different loudspeakers surrounding a desk (0, 90, and 270° azimuth) at which the participant was seated. This arrangement was intended to simulate a small-group classroom learning activity.Fifteen children with moderate to moderately severe hearing loss.Speech recognition was evaluated in the three hearing technology conditions, and subjective auditory preference was evaluated in the HA-ADM and HA-ADM-RM conditions.The use of the remote microphone system in the Small Group mode resulted in a statistically significant improvement in sentence recognition in noise of 24 and 21 percentage points compared with the HA-O and HA-ADM conditions, respectively (individual benefit ranged from −8.6 to 61.1 and 3.4 to 44 percentage points, respectively). There was not a significant difference in sentence recognition in noise between the HA-O and HA-ADM conditions when the remote microphone system was not in use. Eleven of the 14 participants who completed the subjective rating scale reported at least a slight preference for the use of the remote microphone system in the Small Group mode.Objective and subjective measures of sentence recognition indicated that use of remote microphone technology with the Small Group mode may improve hearing performance in small-group learning activities. Sentence recognition in noise improved by 24 percentage points compared to the HA-O condition, and children expressed a preference for the use of the remote microphone Small Group technology regarding listening comfort, sound quality, speech intelligibility, background noise reduction, and overall listening experience.

Overall, the adaptive NLFC processing evaluated in this study has the potential to significantly improve speech perception relative to conventional NLFC processing.