Purpose: Problems in speech recognition are often apparent in telecommunication situations. For ecologically valid assessments of such conditions, it is important to quantify the impact of real environments including acoustic conditions at a far-end communication device and all paths of transmission degradation. This study presents an automated matrix sentence test procedure based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) integrated in a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) infrastructure and compares the individual effects of transmission degradations with results from laboratory measurements. Method: Speech recognition thresholds (SRTs) were measured in 16 normal-hearing subjects in four test conditions: (a) a laboratory condition guided by a human experimenter, (b) a laboratory condition with reduced bandwidth and (c) additionally reduced headset quality to simulate typical communication systems, and (d) an automated, ASR-controlled adaptive test procedure over a real VoIP infrastructure. Errors of the ASR system were analyzed to show possible effects on measurement outcome Results: Measured SRTs showed a highly significant correlation ( r = .93) between the fully automatic and “laboratory” conditions, with a constant bias of about 1 dB indicating a linear shift of the data without affecting the distribution around the mean. The individual impact of the different system degradations on SRTs could be quantified Conclusions: This study provides a proof of concept for automated ASR-based SRT measurements over VoIP systems for speech audiometric testing in real communication systems, as it produced results comparable to traditional laboratory settings for this group of 16 normal-hearing subjects. This makes VoIP services a promising candidate for speech audiometric testing in real communication systems.
The individual fitting of hearing aids is still a challenge and usually requires several sessions. The audiologist typically fine-tunes the hearing aids based on the patient’s reported perception. Recent research investigated the alternative of empowering the patient by means of self adjustment. However, all known studies on self-adjustment procedures have so far focused on symmetric hearing loss and a symmetrical signal modification adjustable by the user. It is therefore still unknown how to deal with severe asymmetric hearing losses. In this study, we examined a previously evaluated self-adjustmentprocedure for symmetric hearing losses with respect to its applicability for asymmetric hearing losses. For this purpose, experienced hearing-aid users with asymmetric hearing loss were fitted with real hearing aids and equipped with a self-adjustment user interface. Each fitting was performed in several realistic sound scenes in two conditions: first, the two hearing aids were fitted separately; second, both hearing aids were fitted in a coupled way and then fine-tuned separately. In addition to the comparison between the gain settings resulting from the self-adjustments the study examined also subjective sound impressions such as the balance of the sound in both ears.
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