Evaluating the benefit of hearing aids with motion-based beamformer adaptation in a real-world setup

Conventional directional hearing aid microphone technology may obstruct listening intentions when the talker and listener walk side by side. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate hearing aids that use a motion sensor to address listening needs during walking.

Each participant completed two walks in randomised order, one walk with each of two hearing aid programs: (1) conventional beamformer adaptation that activated an adaptive, multiband beamformer in loud environments and (2) motion-based beamformer adaptation that activated a pinna-mimicking microphone setting when walking was detected. Participants walked along a pre-defined track and completed tasks assessing speech understanding and environmental awareness.

Participants were 22 older adults with moderate-to-severe hearing loss and experience using hearing aids.

More participants preferred the motion-based than conventional beamformer adaptation for speech understanding, environmental awareness, overall listening, and sound quality (p < 0.05). Measures of speech understanding (p < 0.01) and localisation of sound stimuli (p < 0.05) were significantly better with motion-based than conventional beamformer adaptation.

The results suggest that hearing aid users can benefit from beamforming that uses motion sensor input to adapt the signal processing according to the user's activity. The real-world setup of this study had limitations.