In this project, virtual reality (VR) technology was used to accurately simulate daily life situations in virtual environments (VEs) in the clinic at the Erasmus MC. The process of selecting the listening situations to include in these VEs and developing the VEs is documented in a conference paper, and the VEs are shared open access on Zenodo. In a newly developed fine-tuning procedure using these VEs, the audiologists involved in the project could try out different hearing device settings in different listening situations together with their patients. Approval from the medical ethics committee at the Erasmus MC was obtained to carry out a study evaluating this new VR fine-tuning procedure in hearing aid users and cochlear implant users. Preliminary results, documented in a conference paper, showed a significant improvement with the fit resulting from the VR fine-tuning procedure in terms of speech intelligibility and preference for some participants. There were no participants for whom the fit resulting from the VR fine-tuning was significantly worse than the clinical fit, although sometimes the differences between the two fits were small and some participants preferred the clinical fit. The data collection for this study is currently being finalized.
A previous study carried out in this project, approved by the medical ethics committee, showed that two listening effort test methods were not suitable to compare different hearing device settings in cochlear implant users. The data set from the listening effort study is published open access on Zenodo, and the accompanying paper was submitted to a journal.
Overall, the project shows the potential of the new VR fine-tuning procedure. Besides the measured speech intelligibility improvement and preference for the VR fit for some participants, some other positive effects of the VR fine-tuning could be seen. All participants were positive about the VR fine-tuning and liked that they could try out their settings in different situations. They would all recommend others to do the VR fine-tuning procedure. Even if the resulting VR fit was not better than the clinical fit, they still thought it was good to know that their fit could not be further improved and this helped them to accept the current situation. Moreover, it was possible to counsel the participants during the VR fine-tuning, for example to urge them to face the speaker when the directional microphone was active, and they could experience that this had an effect. Finally, the VR fine-tuning procedure also helped the audiologists and researcher to understand better what problems hearing device users are facing.
