Hearing at the Mall: Multibeam Processing Technology Improves Hearing Group Conversations in a Real-World Food Court Environment.

Purpose: This study aimed to evaluate conversation hearing with an adaptive beamforming hearing aid that supports adaptive tracking of multiple talkers in an ecologically valid, real-world food court environment in a busy mall.
Method: Twenty older adult experienced hearing aid wearers with sensorineural hearing loss were fitted in the lab with binaural receiver-in-the-canal style hearing aids set with two programs, each having a different beamforming strategy. The participant and two researchers then met in a moderately noisy and reverberant food court at a local mall where the participant was asked to listen to a conversation between the two researchers. Participants rated the extent of their agreement with 10 positively worded statements specific to the conversation twice, once for each program. Participants then provided program-preference ratings for seven different aspects of a conversation during which the programs were switched back and forth by the researcher, so that participants were unaware of the condition to which they were listening.
Results: Real-world subjective ratings for all domains resulted in positive values on average for both programs. Pairwise comparisons indicated that the intervention algorithm had higher absolute ratings on five of the 10 criteria including understanding, clarity, focus, listening effort, and background noise. Ratings for preference between programs indicated a significant preference for the intervention algorithm for all seven criteria.
Conclusions: In a real-world setting, the use of hearing aids with separate processing of sounds from the front and back hemisphere provided positive subjective ratings. However, following a group conversation with multiple conversation partners, improvements in the algorithm to account for the locations of interlocutors and the natural head turning of the hearing aid wearer that occurs during a conversation by adding and controlling multiple adaptive beams in the front hemisphere significantly influenced preference for all aspects rated.