Clinical Applications of Ambisonics Soundfield

Background: Although real-life hearing takes place in space and in noise, current testing and fitting procedures are held in oversimplified laboratory environments. Important aspects of real-life hearing are ignored and the full potential of modern hearing devices cannot be properly evaluated. It has also been shown that this “mismatch” may lead to reduced ecological validity of fitting results and unsatisfactory hearing experiences for patients.

Objective: To evaluate the feasibility of implementing Ambisonics soundfield in a clinical setting.

Methods: higher order Ambisonics for clinical applications encloses 24 loudspeakers aligned on 3 parallels, evenly covering the surface of a hemisphere. Acoustic stimuli are presented from sources located randomly on a virtual hemisphere around the subject. Pointing tasks and trajectories of indication are recorded with a motion capture system. Speech in noise in diffuse and direct soundfield has been also evaluated.

Results: normal references values of different auditory tasks are reported.

Conclusion: feasibility of Ambisonics soundfield testing in a clinical setting has been discussed and endorsed for simulating more ecological speech-in-noise and localisation tasks.