Listening Hard: New Tools for Monitoring Effort in Listening to Speech in Noise
Listening to conversation with noisy environments can be very challenging, especially for people who are in disadvantage in the first place (with hearing impairment or listening to a second language). However, our perception of ‘Effort in Listening’ is still insufficient. The main object of this project is to find standard methods to measure and observe ‘effort’ in listening over long periods.
Signal Processing, Audio & Hearing
Hearing speech is usually easy but understanding speech in noise or in poor acoustic environments can be very challenging.
This impacts people’s ability to communicate, especially over extended periods, impair their social interaction and their performance at work or at school. For hearing impaired listeners, some even with only mild impairment, this can become critical and exclude them from particular environments and activities and degrade their general wellbeing. However, our understanding of ‘Effort in Listening’ or ‘Ease of Listening’ remains limited, and current tools to quantify these constructs are not sufficiently robust and no ‘gold standard’ has emerged.
The overarching aim of the current project is to find methods that can continuously monitor ‘effort’ in listening over extended periods, using a range of physiological signals (e.g. heart-rate, respiratory rate, skin impedance, pupil diameter etc.) and advanced multivariate signal analysis approaches. Our vision is that such methods will support the evidence-based design of future aided hearing devices (hearing aids, cochlear implants etc.) and their fitting to improve ease of listening. The methods also aim to support the optimized design of acoustic environments and noise emissions for ease of communication. Monitoring effort continuously over extended periods, and not only after specific (brief) tasks, as is currently commonly done, will permit the assessment of fatigue and the effects of changing listening
