90 Clinical Trials for Various Conditions
Hearing impaired participants will be fit with study devices which will have three different hearing aid programs. Speech intelligibility will be measured using validated tests for each of the three hearing aid programs. The order of the hearing aid programs will be randomized across participants and each participant will be blinded as to the programs being tested.
Hearing Loss, Bilateral or Unilateral
Hearing loss is a major public health concern due to its negative association with emotional well-being, cognition, and physical ailments, such as diabetes. Access to audiologists and otolaryngologists in many regions across the US is poor or extremely limited. Rural populations are older, less educated, and have lower household incomes compared to populations in metropolitan areas. Also, with increasing age adults experience greater rates of hearing loss. Fortunately, the 2022 FDA Final Rule for Over-the-Counter Hearing Aids (OTC HAs) could revolutionize assess to hearing aids and hearing healthcare by allowing adults with perceived mild-to-moderate hearing loss to purchase these devices over the counter, without medical clearance or care from an audiologist. Pharmacies located in rural areas now have the option to provide OTC HAs, something previously not possible. Currently, however, there are no established guidelines for effective provision of these devices in pharmacies located in rural communities. Educating pharmacy technicians to provide basic hearing healthcare related to OTC HAs use could address a critical need and create a new care delivery model to ensure sustainable, long-term access to hearing healthcare. The long-term goal of this study is to create a sustainable interprofessional collaborative between audiologists and pharmacists for the development of a hearing healthcare model that improves access and affordability of care in rural regions across the country. The specific aims are to 1) Determine an effective approach for educating pharmacy technicians for the provision of OTC HAs in rural community pharmacies, and 2) Identify satisfaction of care provided by pharmacy technicians and initial performance with OTC HAs in adults with hearing loss living in rural communities. A stepped wedged clinical trial design will be used to study the effectiveness of a comprehensive educational training program for pharmacy technicians. Technicians from rural Alabama and Mississippi, placed within four different clusters, will participate in a multimodal training program for the purpose of developing basic clinical skills to assist adults with perceived mild-to-moderate hearing loss. Additionally, adults with hearing loss who receive clinical services from trained pharmacy technicians will be asked to report on the care they received and benefit from their OTC HAs. The central hypotheses are a) that pharmacy technician training will result in greater understanding of hearing healthcare concepts compared to no training, and b) the training will lead to successful provision of basic hearing healthcare to adults with hearing loss in rural communities. The expected outcome of this project will be the establishment of a multimodal education program, leveraging the increased access of OTC HAs, to support those with hearing loss in rural pharmacies across the county. The ability of pharmacy technicians to provide this support will dramatically increase the availability of hearing services in rural communities, which will positively impact the quality of life for those with hearing loss.
Bilateral Hearing Loss
This study will assess the benefit of extended wear hearing aids for subjective listening effort, compared to the unaided condition, in adults with mild sensorineural hearing loss.
Sensorineural Hearing Loss
The purpose of this study is to determine if artificial intelligence- based noise reduction can offer objective improvement in hearing and speech perception for hearing impaired patients.
Hearing Loss
This goal of this study is to learn if a new audiology treatment process called the self-efficacy-based auditory rehabilitation (SEBAR) can improve confidence and success with over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids. The main questions it aims to answer are: * Can the SEBAR improve participants' confidence related to managing their over-the-counter hearing aids? * Can the SEBAR improve participants' willingness to adopt over-the-counter hearing aids, their satisfaction, quality of life, and their emotional state? Researchers will compare these outcomes of the SEBAR with and without wearing OTC hearing aids. Participants will: * Visit for one appointment to complete a few questionnaires without OTC hearing aids * Wear a pair of ITC hearing aids for a week and use an app to answer questions about their experiences * Visit for a second appointment to complete the same questionnaires with OTC hearing aids.
Hearing Loss, Sensorineural
Hearing aids can improve hearing, communication, and overall quality of life for people with hearing loss. However, not many people use hearing aids. A common reason is that hearing aids are expensive and hard to get. The traditional way to get hearing aids involves multiple visits to licensed audiologists for identifying hearing loss, customizing the aids, and ongoing maintenance. This traditional method is called the AUD pathway. Over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids offer a different approach. They aim to make hearing aids more affordable and accessible, encouraging earlier use. In the OTC pathway, users diagnose their own hearing loss and fit and program the hearing aids themselves. Little is known about long-term effects of OTC hearing aids on users. This study aims to compare the experiences of people who choose the OTC pathway with those who choose the AUD pathway. It takes place in two locations: Iowa City, IA, and Nashville, TN. Participants, who have mild-to-moderate hearing loss, choose their preferred pathway and are followed for 12 months. In the OTC pathway, participants buy their hearing aids directly from OTC companies or retailers. In the AUD pathway, prescription hearing aids and fitting services are provided by audiology clinics at the University of Iowa and Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Participants are contacted 1, 6, and 12 months after starting to use their hearing aids. Researchers measure their satisfaction about hearing aids and other outcomes. If participants stop using their hearing aids, researchers assess their engagement with post-amplification hearing care. The results from both pathways are then compared.
Hearing Loss, Sensorineural, Presbycusis
This study explores the impact of hearing aid settings for managing sudden sounds on speech comprehension and recall in individuals with hearing loss. Participants will undergo a comprehensive audiological evaluation, case history, and cognitive assessments. Subsequently, they will participate in listening experiments designed to measure sentence recognition, storage, and retrieval under various sudden sound reduction conditions recorded through a hearing aid. The experiment will be complemented by subjective preference ratings to identify participant comfort and listening clarity associated with different sudden sound reduction settings.
Hearing Loss
Since 2000, at least 250,000 U.S. Service members have experienced a blast-related mild traumatic brain injury. A retrospective analysis of over 100,000 post-9/11 Veterans shows that blast injury more than doubles the risk of a diagnosed auditory problem. Many blast-exposed Veterans experience "functional hearing difficulties" (FHDs): problems in challenging listening environments despite clinically normal hearing as measured by the pure-tone audiogram. VA audiologists have begun using low-gain hearing aids to treat FHDs, but there are no concrete guidelines for this application given standard procedures rely on the pure-tone audiogram. This study proposes a data-driven approach called speech-based audiometry (SBA), which optimizes hearing aid gains from a patient's responses to speech stimuli in aided conditions. This trial will assess the behavioral (speech recognition in noise, subjective listening difficulty) and neurophysiological (functional neuroimaging during a speech recognition task) benefits of low-gain hearing aids programmed conventionally or with SBA among blast-exposed Veterans with FHDs.
Auditory Diseases, Central
The proposed field trial will clarify the real-world effectiveness of HAs in remediating deficits in emotion processing for older adults with mild-to-moderate hearing loss. This study will employ a repeated reversal design to establish baseline affective state without HAs, when wearing amplification, and after HAs are removed. This study will triangulate self-report, behavioral, and physiological measures to capture nuances of emotional processing in the laboratory and in daily listening. Naturalistic stimuli will be used as it occurs in daily life to elicit emotional experiences, and ecological momentary assessment and commercially-available wearable sensors will be used to track changes in emotional state in daily listening. Anchoring real-world emotional experiences with controlled laboratory experiences will validate wearable sensors. Additionally, laboratory emotional stimuli will be related to real-world emotional experiences to establish the utility of laboratory stimuli in future studies. It is likely that benefits in emotional processing will have differential effects based on individual characteristics (such as degree of hearing loss, age, gender, cognitive ability, and personality), so participants will be analyzed according to larger groupings based on individual differences.
Hearing Loss, Hearing Loss, Sensorineural, Emotions, Stress Physiology
Approximately 48 million people in the United States have hearing loss or hearing difficulties in noisy environments. Concha Inc. is working on introducing a wireless air-conduction hearing aid to the market, featuring a self-fitting feature. Self-fitting hearing aids have emerged in recent years as a potentially viable option towards addressing unmet hearing health care needs for millions of individuals who suffer from mild-to-moderate hearing loss. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the efficiency and reliability of the self-fitting strategy developed by Concha Inc.
Hearing Loss
Every year, approximately 100,000 Veterans seek help at VA Audiology clinics for hearing and communication difficulties only to learn that they have normal hearing sensitivity. Unfortunately, there are very few established options to improve hearing and listening for these patients. To address this need, audiologists are increasingly prescribing hearing aids set to provide a small amount of amplification. Patients may benefit from the amplification or from modern hearing aid features such as noise reduction technology and the ability to stream sounds from a desired sound source directly to their ears thus reducing the background noise. This project will help to determine if prescribing hearing aids to patients without hearing loss is, in fact, beneficial and if so, why. It will also help to determine if some patients benefit more from hearing aids than others so that in the future, rehabilitation strategies can be better targeted toward individuals.
Auditory Processing Disorder
The goal of this study is to better understand if, in patients with mild to moderate hearing loss who are also experiencing mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD), Over-the-Counter (OTC) hearing aids: 1. improve communication 2. Whether the magnitude of benefit depends on the patient's level of cognitive disability, 3. Whether alternative remediation (such as targeted communication strategies) offer similar benefits. Participants and a communication partner will be randomized into an OTC first or Communication Strategies first arm, where participants will receive communication strategy information customized for those with cognitive impairment.
Hearing Loss, Mild Cognitive Impairment, Alzheimer Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD)
The aim of this proposed project is to understand whether direct to consumer (DTC) hearing aids programmed to individual hearing losses, can reduce listening effort for effective communication. If DTC aids can provide benefits beyond amplification, then they could be an affordable option to reduce barriers to care and improve hearing aid uptake in adults with hearing loss.
Hearing Loss, Hearing Loss, Sensorineural, Hearing Loss, Bilateral
New discoveries for hearing loss intervention are often impeded by the proprietary nature of commercial hearing aids and their use in scientific research as "black boxes". An open-source speech platform (OSP) was developed to bridge the gap between audiology research and commercial hearing aid features, to promote innovative solutions to meet the needs of the hearing loss community. The OSP can replicate functions found in commercial hearing aids, and provides tools to researchers to access those functions. The purpose of this study is to evaluate portable and cloud-based platforms of the OSP that will enable a wide range of lab and field applications. All human subjects-related activities will be conducted at Northwestern University (single-site study).
Hearing Loss, Hearing Loss, Sensorineural
Pre-market Clinical Investigation whose primary purpose is to evaluate efficacy and effectiveness of self-fitting hearing aids
Hearing Loss, Sensorineural
Normal-hearing participants aged 18-25 with and without musical training will listen to a series of short musical samples that have been recorded through hearing aids. The music will be played at a comfortable listening level. Subjects will use the computer to rate the sound quality of the music on a 7-point Likert scale.
Sensorineural Hearing Loss
Approximately 48 million people in the United States have hearing loss or hearing difficulties in noisy environments. Whisper.ai Inc has previously brought to market a commercial hearing aid system that reduces background noise and amplifies voices and sounds of interest using its proprietary platform based on machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies. Whisper.ai Inc now seeks to bring to market a new hearing system that will incorporate a "self-fitting" capability. Self-fitting hearing aids have emerged in recent years as a potentially viable option to calibrate hearing aids to the needs of individual users without clinician intervention. The purpose of this project is to evaluate the efficiency and reliability of the fitting procedure and algorithms developed by Whisper.ai Inc. The study will be carried out using a randomized crossover design in two phases: in phase 1, subjects will be tested and a hearing aid will be fitted using conventional audiological standard procedures , and in phase 2, the subject will be tested and a hearing aid will be fitted using the results of the self-fitting algorithm. Objective, subjective, and behavioral responses will be gathered from a variety of hearing-related surveys and tests, and will be analyzed quantitatively to evaluate the efficiency and reliability of the self-fitting algorithm. The investigators expect the fitting results of the Whisper.ai self-fitting algorithm to be similar to those of standardized fitting procedures conducted by hearing professionals.
Hearing Loss
This study will compare different microphone technologies in a noisy environment when the dominant speaker is at the front, back, left, or right side of the listener.
Hearing Loss
This investigation will compare hearing aid fitting methods between self-fitting and clinician fitting approaches by using a standardized questionnaire to evaluate subjective hearing aid benefit.
Hearing Loss
Participants with hearing loss and Tinnitus will wear hearing aids with amplification-only or with an added sound, and have their tinnitus level evaluated before and after intervention.
Hearing Loss, Sensorineural, Tinnitus
New and experienced hearing aid users will be fit with two hearing devices. One will be labeled as an OTC (Over-The-Counter) device, the other will be labeled as a Prescriptive (i.e. professionally fit) device. Both devices will be generically programmed for a mild to moderate hearing loss. An objective speech in noise test will be completed with both devices.
Hearing Loss
Two groups of hearing aid candidates will be fit with extended wear technology. One group will be fit with the commercially available models, and the other group will be fit with either the commercially available model or a new model with different fitting characteristic. After an appropriate trial period, the success rate of each group will be determined by the desire to purchase devices.
Hearing Loss
Eargo, Inc. has developed a hearing aid that contains self-fitting gain software that allows adults with mild-to-moderate hearing loss to test their hearing sensitivity and program hearing aids to match their measured hearing loss. Traditionally, hearing aids are custom programmed by a hearing health professional based on a professional hearing test. This technology has the potential to improve affordability and accessibility of hearing aids for adults with mild-to-moderate hearing loss. We propose to validate Eargo's self-fitting software in a clinical trial comparing self-fitting hearing aid outcomes to the same hearing aid fit by a professional following usual clinical best practice for fitting hearing aids.
Hearing and Vision Loss
The present study will investigate the benefit of hearing aids for speech intelligibility (in both quiet and noisy environments) compared to the unaided condition. Participants will include adults with moderate to moderately severe hearing impairment. The participants will complete laboratory-based speech intelligibility assessments with binaural hearing aids and without hearing aids.
Hearing Loss, Sensorineural
Participants will be comparing the sound quality of their own voice and the sound quality of streamed music using universal couplings and a custom earmold with a dynamic vent.
Hearing Loss, Sensorineural
Hearing aids are commonly used to help people with hearing loss hear better in daily listening environments. MDHearing Smart hearing aids are designed to use the MDHearing app to adjust hearing aids to each individual's hearing loss. This study intends to show whether the MDHearing Smart hearing aids can be fitted by each user reliably and if each user can use the MDHearing app on their smartphone or tablet to make adjustments to achieve good aided benefit, which will be compared to those fitted by audiology professionals. This study includes three components: human factor study, self-fit study, and professional-fit study. The information obtained will be useful for both audiology professionals and people with impaired hearing.
Hearing Loss
Comfort and clarity of speech will be measured in hearing impaired children age 8-17 using standard speech processing algorithm with a soft speech enhancer feature, referred to as the Adaptive Situational Gain (ASG) feature in study documents.
Hearing Loss
This clinical investigation is designed to compare audiological performance (i.e., measurements of sound quality and speech understanding) between Starkey's new receiver-in-canal device and a commercially available legacy receiver-in-canal device.
Hearing Loss, Sensorineural, Hearing Loss
Quality and reliability study of hearing aid. Adults with mild to severe hearing loss will wear hearing aids daily for approximately 3 months.
Hearing Loss
This study will evaluate the impact of hearing aid microphone directionality technologies and settings on speech understanding in noise for experienced hearing aid users. It will also evaluate the participant's spatial awareness of sounds using these different hearing aid microphone directionality technologies.
Hearing Loss