Research Thread II: IT-based diagnostics and rehabilitation

The challenge

Hearing support for persons with a beginning, mild or moderate hearing loss (that usually develops with age and affects approx. 50% of persons aged over 65) is often sought too late. It thus provides only a limited user benefit, due to poor public and individual awareness of existing hearing problems, low accessibility of professional help, limitations in the diagnosis and in fitting procedures of hearing devices, and limited functionality of hearing devices in ameliorating sensorineural hearing loss.

Our approach

Groundbreaking data- and model-driven approaches towards self-controlled hearing tests and fitting of hearing devices will be advanced for listeners with a beginning, a mild or a moderate hearing impairment.

We aim for:

• a multilingual “virtual hearing clinic” providing a low-threshold, affordable access and basic hearing support for every smartphone user
• the development of a comprehensive system of multilingual diagnostic methods, functional auditory models, and hearing-aid fitting tools for smartphone-based devices in combination with data-driven, machine-learning-supported inference techniques
• the establishment of a suitable “big” audiological data pool to quantify any possible relationships between audiological screening, diagnostic and hearing-aid benefit parameters and hence to verify or falsify the auditory model predictions developed in Hearing4all