H2020Индивидуална стипендия2021–2023

VR-FIT · Improving hearing device fitting with virtual reality

„Хоризонт 2020“ — Действия „Мария Склодовска-Кюри“

Период: 2021-05-10 → 2023-05-09
Финансиране от ЕС: 175 572 €
Участници: 1
Схема: MSCA-IF

Линиите свързват координатора с партньорите.

Накратко на български

Виртуалната реалност се използва за настройка на слухови апарати и кохлеарни импланти чрез симулиране на шумни ежедневни ситуации в клиниката. Това помага за по-точното настройване на устройствата и подобрява разбираемостта на речта за пациентите.

Този кратък обзор е генериран от изкуствен интелект

Кратко обяснение, генерирано от езиков модел по текста на CORDIS. Оригиналът е по-долу.

Резултати накратко

Improving hearing device fitting with virtual reality

Hearing impairment is a common disease with a large impact on social interaction and psychosocial well-being. Partial rehabilitation is possible by providing hearing devices. The settings of hearing aids and cochlear implants have to be adjusted to fit individual needs. This fitting process normally takes place in the relatively quiet clinic or acoustician’s store, whereas hearing devices are most needed in noisy and reverberant situations in daily life. This mismatch may lead to inefficiency and suboptimal settings. Mainly because the current fitting process is based on trial-and-error: adjustments made in the clinic have to be evaluated in daily life, after which further adjustment (fine-tuning) is needed. In this project, virtual reality (VR) technology was used to accurately simulate daily life situations in virtual environments (VEs) in the clinic at the Erasmus MC. In a newly developed fine-tuning procedure using these VEs, audiologists could try out different hearing device settings in different listening situations together with their patients. This new VR fine-tuning procedure was evaluated with hearing aid users and cochlear implant users. Results showed a significant improvement with the fit resulting from the VR fine-tuning procedure in terms of speech intelligibility and preference for some participants. There were no participants for whom the fit resulting from the VR fine-tuning was significantly worse than the clinical fit, although sometimes the differences between the two fits were small and some participants preferred the clinical fit. Overall, the project shows the potential of the new VR fine-tuning procedure to improve the outcome of the hearing rehabilitation process. Further research is needed to improve the VR fine-tuning procedure, to investigate the cost effectiveness, and to determine which patient groups would benefit from it.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз

Цел на проекта

Hearing impairment is a common disease with a large impact on social interaction and psychosocial well-being. Partial rehabilitation is possible by providing hearing devices. The settings of hearing aids and cochlear implants have to be adjusted to fit individual needs. This fitting process normally takes place in the relatively quiet clinic or acoustician’s store, whereas hearing devices are most needed in noisy and reverberant situations in daily life. This mismatch may lead to inefficiency and suboptimal settings. Mainly because the current fitting process is based on trial-and-error: adjustments made in the clinic have to be evaluated in daily life, after which further adjustment (fine-tuning) is needed. Recent advances in virtual reality would allow for an accurate simulation of daily life situations in virtual environments (VEs) in the clinic. Using such VEs, adjustments could be tested immediately. It is hypothesized that using VEs makes the fitting process more efficient, allows for better counselling of the patient, and will lead to better final settings and a higher patient satisfaction. The proposed project aims to investigate these hypotheses. The work plan of the proposed project entails designing VEs for hearing device fine-tuning (thanks to the collaboration with University of Oldenburg, previously developed VEs can be used as a basis) and establishing the new fine-tuning procedure, in close collaboration with clinicians and patients to maximize the usability. Furthermore, an experiment is planned that compares the standard and new fine-tuning procedures between groups of hearing aid users and cochlear implant users. The project is unique by introducing VEs in a clinical setting to improve the outcome of the hearing rehabilitation process. It is also one of the few studies of the fitting process in both hearing-aid users and cochlear implant users, which is possible thanks to the unique patient population in the host institution, Erasmus MC.

Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).

Участници

ERASMUS UNIVERSITAIR MEDISCH CENTRUM ROTTERDAM · RotterdamКоординаторНидерландия