Subjective and objective speech intelligibility evaluation of hearing aid prescriptions using a hearing loss simulator

Abstract

The number of older people with age-related hearing loss is increasing, and the development of speech and hearing technologies beyond current hearing aids is desired. To this end, an environment in which developers of signal processing algorithms can directly listen to processed sounds and objective evaluation indices that enable accurate predictions would effectively promote development. In this study, to explore the feasibility of such situations, the effectiveness of the POGO, NAL-RP, and DSLm[i/o] prescriptions was evaluated through speech intelligibility (SI) experiments with young normal-hearing listeners using a hearing loss simulator, WHIS. The results showed that SI was improved by DSLm[i/o], NAL-RP and POGO, in that order, but was lower than without the simulated hearing loss. We attempted to predict these results using the published objective intelligibility metric, GESI, but found that the prediction overestimated the subjective SI and that there was room for improvement.