SS03: REALISTIC ASSESSMENT OF SPEECH AMPLIFICATION

DERIVATION AND APPLICATION OF A SET OF STANDARD AUDIOGRAMS FOR TESTING HEARING DEVICES

Nikolai Bisgaard

GN Resound, Copenhagen, Denmark.

In order to provide a realistic test situation for the characterization of hearing aids, these hearing aids should be programmed by the corresponding fitting software, such to define the actual and complete hearing system. For programming the hearing aid under test a standard audiogram should be selected that is both representative of the hearing aids’ application range and also is representative for a large class of users of that hearing aid. To create such a set of standard audiograms, an analysis of more than 28000 clinical audiometric records was performed, which ultimately led to the construction of a set of 10 audiograms that is that is truly representative of most current audiometric configurations. This new set of standard audiograms serves as a reference to which the hearing aid may be programmed and tested.  Part 2 of the session will focus on the analysis method used to create the standard set of audiograms and on how these audiograms may be used.