Beschreibung
The goal of this project is to develop tools that momentarily assess the health-related quality of life in individual every-day listening situations. Health-related quality of life is the individual's perceived physical and mental health over time and includes aspects of social inclusion, participation, and emotional well-being. This research is important because the currently used quality-of-life questionnaires focus on predefined listening situations and are filled out retrospectively. They therefore might not capture the individual’s needs and might be influenced by biased memory. Hence, the individual benefit of hearing aids or specific signal processing algorithms might not become evident. To overcome the constraints of generally defined situations and recall bias, a highly individualized concept of momentary quality of life assessment is proposed. First, the individual’s daily listening situations will be monitored. Based on this analysis, listening situations which are either important, difficult, or crucial for the participant’s individual quality of life will be identified and examined in a second step. This examination uniquely combines the analysis of the acoustical conditions, self-assessments and external observations that allow characterizing psychologically and sociologically the behavior of hearing-impaired persons in the self-selected environments. During the whole project, a smartphone system with two head-worn microphones, wirelessly coupled, as well as self-reports will be used. The hardware will enable the recording of objective acoustical parameters and further off-line analysis without storing the audio signals and will therefore be privacy-aware. Simultaneously, an app running on the smartphone system will allow for the user’s self-assessment. The relevant situations, identified based on the monitoring, and a subsequent interview will be visited by the participants accompanied by an independent observer. The observer will monitor the participant’s behavior, e.g. their communication activities, using predefined rating scores in addition to the user’s smartphone self-assessment. The improvement of the momentary quality of life through hearing aid provision as well as the potential of the measures to distinguish two different hearing aid settings will be verified. In the course of the project, the hearing aid settings will be limited to general changes available in nearly all hearing aids, to be as independent of manufacturer-specific signal processing schemes as possible. The tools developed during this project will be made available to the hearing aid industry and the general public (open source) and will then allow further research of effects related to specific devices or algorithms. This project will open up new research methods for individual requirements of hearing-impaired persons in their every-day environments.