Objective and Subjective Measures of Listening Effort in Cochlear-Implant Patients: Evaluating the Bimodal Benefit in Different Listening Conditions - OMAI 2018- The 10th International Symposium on Objective Measures in Auditory Implants

Irina Schierholz ^1,2 Hanna Bönitz ^1,2 Carolin Frohne-Buechner ³ Michael Bardt ¹ Esther Ruigendijk ^2,4 Melanie Krueger ^2,5 Andreas Buechner ^1,2

¹Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany
²Cluster of Excellence, "Hearing4all", Germany
³Advanced Bionics GmbH, European Research Center, Hannover, Germany
⁴Department for Dutch Studies, Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany
⁵Hörzentrum Oldenburg GmbH, Oldenburg, Germany

Background: Traditional tests show good speech perception for most cochlear-implant (CI) users however do not reflect the fatigue CI users report from real-life situations. Listening effort (LE) as a measure of resources allocated to process auditory information is not considered.

Objective: The study aims to evaluate LE in different listening situations with objective and subjective measures.

Methods: A study group of 12 bimodal Advanced Bionics CI-users is planned, 5 participants (64.4±6.2y) participated so far. Objective measures of LE were obtained by determining pupil-dilation during a speech-perception task. Participants were presented with speech material of the Oldenburg sentence test either in quiet or in noise (stationary-noise,multi-talker babble) at an individually determined SNR for 84% speech understanding, and were instructed to repeat the perceived speech. Subjective measures of LE for both noise conditions were obtained with an adaptive scaling procedure (ACALES (1)). To investigate the bimodal benefit, all conditions were once performed with the CI only and once with both CI and the hearing aid (HA) on the contralateral side.

Results: Both, subjective and objective measures, obtained so far, suggest higher LE for multi-talker-babble compared to stationary noise. The release in LE gained by additional acoustic information via the HA, however, was similar for both noise types and was observed by subjective and objective measures.

Conclusion: First results revealed that objective and subjective measures of LE can be used to demonstrate the bimodal benefit in CI users.

Krueger M, Schulte M, Brand T, Holube I (2017): Development of an adaptive scaling method for subjective listening effort. J Acoust Soc Am 141:4680–4693.