Welcome to the Hearing Aid Laboratory
Our lab is dedicated to solving the communication problems that affect adults with hearing loss. Our focus is understanding individual abilities, including differences in hearing sensitivity, speech sound discrimination, cognitive ability, and the greater listening difficulties that occur as we age. We study solutions that are customized to individual abilities, including the best ways to select and adjust hearing aids for real-life listening needs. We invite you to learn more through the information on this site.
Understanding how we listen in the real world
Listening is one of our most practiced abilities, using skills learned over decades of life. The ability to recognize spoken speech allows us to learn, to teach, to form relationships and take part in social activities. We expect listening to occur effortlessly … until it doesn’t. Because the listener has hearing loss. Or is listening to an indistinct talker. Or is in a noisy or reverberant room. Under those circumstances, communication can become a barrier.
Our goal is to find evidence-based solutions to hearing loss through hearing technology, clinical guidance, and patient education.
Choosing the right noise management for each listener
Hearing aid options to improve communication in noise include directional processing, digital noise suppression, and remote microphones. We examined the relationship between speech in noise difficulties and the technology the patient received in their clinical fitting.
