- Position identifier: ESR13
- Host partner: HoRZ
Objectives
Speech communication in social environments with difficult listening conditions such as cocktail parties does not only require understanding a single speaker in static background noise. It also requires switching of attention between target sources, e.g., between two or more conversation partners, and adaptation to rapidly changing acoustic fore- and backgrounds. Current hearing aids largely fail to support hearing-impaired listeners in steering their attention appropriately, as they try to suppress all sound sources but one, which prevents the listener from analyzing and perceiving the whole acoustic scene properly. The aim of this project was to overcome this restriction of current hearing aid technology and to improve acoustic communication of hearing-aid users in challenging acoustic conditions by multimodal analysis of both the acoustic environment and the user’s head- and eye-movements to infer optimal settings and steering parameters for the hearing aid’s signal processing and to provide additional visual cues about active sound sources to support attention switching, thereby reducing the cognitive load.
The ESR had the opportunity to pursue a PhD programme at the University of Oldenburg (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Volker Hohmann) on the basis of the cooperation treaty between Hörzentrum and University, which allowed for PhD projects to be conducted at Hörzentrum, jointly supervised with university staff.
Collaboration was planned with the University of Edinburgh and Hacettepe.