Clinical Trial: At-home Auditory Training Clinical Trial

Study Status: Completed
Recruit Status: Completed
Study Type: Interventional

Official Title: At-home Auditory Training Clinical Trial

Brief Summary: The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of an auditory training program used at home with the subject's own hearing aids.

Detailed Summary:

The most common communication complaint of older adults with impaired hearing is that they can hear speech, but can't understand it. This is especially true where there are competing sounds in the background. Previous experiments performed under laboratory settings using a novel word-based auditory-training regimen have demonstrated substantial improvements in open-set recognition of words and sentences in noise. The current proposed study will investigate the effectiveness of the training regimen when used in a patient's home setting with their own hearing aids. All testing for the screening, baseline speech testing, training system orientation, and the outcomes portions of this project will be conducted in the Audiology Research Laboratory (ARL) of the Speech and Hearing Center located at 200 South Jordan Avenue. The use of the training program will be done at the subject's home.

Subjects will first come to the ARL for either one session for a hearing aid follow-up and instruction in the use of the training system (Session 1) or for one session for an initial screening to determine eligibility (Screening) followed then by Session 1. Subjects will then take home a training system that includes a tablet computer that has the training program loaded onto it, a portable loudspeaker, and some accessories. There will be three groups of subjects: (1) Hearing aid alone--no training (passive control); (2) Hearing aid plus auditory training (training); and (3) Hearing aid plus audio book use (active control). Each group will include 40 subjects. Those subjects in the training group and active control group will complete two five-week cycles of training and return to the lab for outcome measures after 10 weeks of training for the primary and secondary outcome measures. The hearing aid alone group will return for the same outcome measures as the training and active control groups,
Sponsor: Indiana University

Current Primary Outcome: Profile of Hearing Aid Performance (PHAP) [ Time Frame: One time: 10 weeks post session 1 ]

The PHAP is a self-report survey about the benefits provided by the patient's hearing aids in a variety of listening situations.


Original Primary Outcome: Same as current

Current Secondary Outcome: Connected Speech Test (CST) [ Time Frame: One time: 10 weeks post session 1 ]

The CST is an "objective" measure of speech-understanding in noise that will be obtained when the patient's are wearing their hearing aids. The patient hears standardized recordings of the speech in noise and then reports the sentences that were heard. These are scored as percent correct.


Original Secondary Outcome: Same as current

Information By: Indiana University

Dates:
Date Received: August 2, 2013
Date Started: July 2013
Date Completion:
Last Updated: March 6, 2017
Last Verified: March 2017