Research Projects

Individuals with sensorineural hearing loss who are fitted with conventional hearing aid often report a need of increased attention to follow speech, especially, in noise and at time tends to withdraw from communication due to mental fatigue. Conventional amplification provides same gain irrespective of signal, thus, signal to noise ratio SNR reduces in adverse listening environments where listener may expend more mental effort or cognitive energy to compensate for the distorted inputs. Subjective studies have reported ease of listening when hearing aid was fitted with either digital noise reduction or adaptive directional microphone. This is because the signal is analyzed for its modulation and gain will be assigned for those frequency corresponds to speech thus SNR increases which can augments for effective use of cognitive resource. Obviously the cost factors add to those hearing aid having advanced features in it, thus, it is pertinent to investigate how much benefit be expected with the combination of advanced features. This will certainly account to cost benefit analysis and adds into counselling protocol to convince patient to procure hearing aid. Therefore, the present study will be conducted to investigate the effect of advanced features in hearing aid on utilization of their cognitive resource available in individuals with hearing impairment and its effect on speech comprehension. Cognitive resource available will be assessed using a dual task paradigm. In addition, dual task performed over sustained period of time examine mental fatigue. The auditory related cognitive tasks will be computerized such that it can be used as standardized tool to assess the cognitive resource in individuals with hearing impairment in clinical set ups. This will minimize the procedure variability in administering and documenting errors in outcome.