Listener-assessed intelligibility of a hearing aid self-adaptive noise filter.

A principal complaint of hearing aid users is the inability to understand speech in the presence of competing background noise. Efforts at reducing the adverse effects of external noise on amplification systems have centered on manually adjusted or low frequency activated high-pass filtering; however, there has been recent interest in the potential of self-adaptive noise reduction systems. In this study we investigate the performance of normals and three groups of sensorineural loss subjects under five noise conditions with a self-adaptive noise filter incorporated in a conventional hearing aid. Significant improvement in monosyllabic word scores with the self-adaptive noise filter were recorded by 30 to 65% of the hearing-impaired subjects under four of the five noise conditions.