Improving hearing device fitting with virtual reality

Hearing impairment is a common disease with a large impact on social interaction and psychosocial well-being. Partial rehabilitation is possible by providing hearing devices. The settings of hearing aids and cochlear implants have to be adjusted to fit individual needs.

This fitting process normally takes place in the relatively quiet clinic or acoustician’s store, whereas hearing devices are most needed in noisy and reverberant situations in daily life. This mismatch may lead to inefficiency and suboptimal settings.

Mainly because the current fitting process is based on trial-and-error: adjustments made in the clinic have to be evaluated in daily life, after which further adjustment (fine-tuning) is needed.

Recent advances in virtual reality would allow for an accurate simulation of daily life situations in virtual environments (VEs) in the clinic. Using such VEs, adjustments could be tested immediately.

It is hypothesized that using VEs makes the fitting process more efficient, allows for better counselling of the patient, and will lead to better final settings and a higher patient satisfaction. The proposed project aims to investigate these hypotheses.

The work plan of the proposed project entails designing VEs for hearing device fine-tuning (thanks to the collaboration with University of Oldenburg, previously developed VEs can be used as a basis) and establishing the new fine-tuning procedure, in close collaboration with clinicians and patients to maximize the usability.

Furthermore, an experiment is planned that compares the standard and new fine-tuning procedures between groups of hearing aid users and cochlear implant users.

The project is unique by introducing VEs in a clinical setting to improve the outcome of the hearing rehabilitation process.

It is also one of the few studies of the fitting process in both hearing-aid users and cochlear implant users, which is possible thanks to the unique patient population in the host institution, Erasmus MC.