Objective assessment of listening effort in the oscillatory EEG: comparison of different hearing aid configurations

An objective estimate of listening effort could support the hearing aid fitting procedure. Most of the digital hearing aids have already hearing aid settings which are supposed to reduce the listening effort, but the effects of these settings on the individual's listening effort remain unclear. In this study, we propose an objective estimate of listening effort using electroencephalographic data. The new method is based on the phase distribution of the ongoing oscillatory EEG activity. We hypothesize that for a non-effortful listening environment the phase is rather uniformly distributed on the unit circle than for a demanding condition. To prove if the phase is uniformly distributed around the unit circle, the Rayleigh Test was applied to the phase of the EEG. This method was tested in 14 hearing impaired subjects (moderate hearing loss, 65.64 ±7.93 yrs, 7 female). The tested hearing aid settings were a directional microphone combined with a noise reduction algorithm in a medium and a strong setting, the noise reduction setting turned off as well as a setting using omnidirectional microphones. Noise embedded sentences (Oldenburg Sentence Test, OlSa) were used as test materials. The task of the subject was to repeat each sentence. The results indicate that the objective estimate of listening effort maps the subjectively rated effort and for a listening situation like the presented one, the strong setting of the directional microphone requires the smallest effort.