Hearing at the mall: Multibeam processing technology improves hearing group conversations in a real-world food court environment

In a study performed by researchers at the University of Western Ontario, the RealTime Conversation Enhancement (RTCE) technology implemented in the Signia Integrated Xperience (IX) hearing aids was assessed by a group of 20 participants with hearing loss. The testing was performed in a challenging real-world environment – a food court in a busy mall – where the participants rated their listening experience when being in a group conversation in the noisy surroundings. The results showed significant improvements offered by RTCE in several of the perceptual domains, which were assessed (e.g., speech understanding and listening effort), and the findings underline the importance of conducting hearing aid research in real-world settings. The real-would test environment used in this study offered a high level of ecological validity, and the study is therefore a valuable supplement to previous RTCE research done in the lab.

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