Speech perception is individual

One research project has followed a number of people in need of hearing support. Studying the interaction of language, speech and hearing loss across many day-to-day situations, it became apparent that formal word recognition tests in constructed background noise differed significantly from the real-life experiences of people with hearing loss.

From another study we learned that speech understanding in complex and changing environments varies dramatically between individuals. The key to good speech understanding in such changing environments lies not only in understanding what is said by a desired talker, but also to ignore what is said by competing talkers. The results of this study made it clear that ignoring the competition is much more difficult for people with hearing loss than for normal hearing people.

User insight drives our innovation

Our observations made it clear that to help people understand speech better, we had to do more than simply make sound audible. We had to make it easier to organise sounds, to select and identify the primary sound of interest and to help people follow the sounds they want to pay attention to. This insight founds the basis for the new hearing solutions we bring to market.