Contribution
Evaluating sound quality of OTC hearing assistive devices
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Over-the-Counter (OTC) hearing devices have during the past years been introduced in the market followed by increased awareness from the end-users. The target group is users with mild to moderate hearing loss and the form factor ranges from traditional BTE (Behind-the-ear) devices to TWS (True-Wireless-Stereo) earbuds like Apple Airpods Pro 2. The primary objective for all the products is to improve the speech intelligibility for users in challenging environments. But further technical challenges are introduced for the TWS types due to the physical contradiction of blocking the natural hearing of the user by means of a closed sealing. Transducers and relevant signal processing then have to restore the sound environments again for both the spatial, dynamic and timbre domains,- all which plays a crucial role in our natural perception of speech and sounds around us. We present an approach for how to evaluate perceptually relevant sound quality measures of OTC devices like: speech intelligibility, own voice, spatial localization, speech quality in noisy environments incl. wind and more. Results will be presented from tests completed with our trained hearing impaired listener panel.