Evaluation of speech processing for telephone use by older adult listeners with hearing loss
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Date
2007
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Publisher
Ohio State University. Department of Speech and Hearing Science
Abstract
Telephone communication is a significant difficulty for many older adults with
hearing loss. Due to communication difficulties that counselors at the Franklin County
Office on Aging experienced with many callers with hearing loss, The Ohio State
University Department of Speech and Hearing Science and the Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering developed a speech enhancement algorithm. This algorithm
pre-processes speech on the talker's end before being sent over the telephone line.
Twenty older adults with hearing loss participated in Experiment 1 of this study to
determine the best speech intelligibility test (phoneme-based test, sentence test, or signal-to-
noise ratio [S/N] test) for evaluating the performance of older adult listeners with
sensorineural hearing loss over the telephone. Results revealed an improvement in
speech perception with processing and indicated that the representative S/N test, the
Quick Speech in Noise test, was the most effective and efficient test for this evaluation.
Thirty older adults participated in Experiment 2, which verified that the commercial
version of the speech processing algorithm led to an improvement in the speech
recognition abilities of older adults over the telephone, and confirmed that this
improvement was equal to the improvements resulting from the laboratory version.