Niels Henrik Pontoppidan

Eriksholm Research Centre · Augmented Hearing

A new competing voices test based on male and female HINT sentences has been run on normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners. Different cue placements and spatial conditions were used and significant effects were found from both.

For real-time or close to real-time applications, sound source separation can be performed on-line, where new frames of incoming data for a mixture signal are processed as they arrive, at very low delay. We propose an approach which generates the separation filters for short synthesis frames to achieve low latency source separation, based on a comp...

Hearing aid users are challenged in listening situations with noise and especially speech-on-speech situations with two or more competing voices. Specifically, the task of attending to and segregating two competing voices is particularly hard, unlike for normal-hearing listeners, as shown in a small sub-experiment. In the main experiment, the compe...

Introduction The holistic management of hearing loss (HL) requires an understanding of factors that predict hearing aid (HA) use and benefit beyond the acoustics of listening environments. Although several predictors have been identified, no study has explored the role of audiological, cognitive, behavioural and physiological data nor has any study...

Introduction This study aimed to investigate the daily sound exposure of hearing aid (HA) users during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a specific focus on the impact of different governance intervention levels. Methods Modern HA technology was employed to measure and compare the sound exposure of HA users in three distinct periods: pre-pandemic, and t...

Interaural time differences (ITDs) are important cues for determining the azimuth location of a sound source and need to be accurately reproduced, in a virtual reality (VR) environment, to achieve a realistic sense of sound location for the listener. ITDs are usually included in head related transfer functions (HRTFs) used for audio rendering , and...

Objectives: It has been shown that monitoring temporary threshold shift (TTS) after exposure to noise may have a predictive value for susceptibility of developing permanent noise-induced hearing loss. The aim of this study is to present the assumptions of the TTS predictive model after its verification in normal hearing subjects along with demonst...

Background Listening programs enable hearing aid (HA) users to change device settings for specific listening situations and thereby personalize their listening experience. However, investigations into real-world use of such listening programs to support clinical decisions and evaluate the success of HA treatment are lacking. Objective We aimed to i...

Despite having individual perceptual preferences toward sounds, hearing aid users often end up with default hearing aid settings that have no contextual awareness. However, the introduction of smartphone-connected hearing aids has enabled a rethinking of hearing aids as user-adaptive systems considering both individual and contextual differences. I...

Background Hearing loss is a major public health challenge. Audiology services need to utilise a range of rehabilitative services and maximise innovative practice afforded by technology to actively promote personalized, participatory, preventative and predictive care if they are to cope with the social and economic burden placed on the population b...

While the assessment of hearing aid use has traditionally relied on subjective self-reported measures, smartphone-connected hearing aids enable objective data logging from a large number of users. Objective data logging allows to overcome the inaccuracy of self-reported measures. Moreover, data logging enables assessing hearing aid use with a great...

Data for monitoring individual hearing aid usage has historically been limited to retrospective questionnaires or data logged intrinsically in the hearing aid cumulatively over time (e. g., days or more). This limits the investigation of longitudinal interactions between hearing aid use and environmental or behavioral factors. Recently it has becom...

We investigate the short-term association between multidimensional acoustic characteristics of everyday ambient sound and continuous mean heart rate. We used in-market data from hearing aid users who logged ambient acoustics via smartphone-connected hearing aids and continuous mean heart rate in 5 min intervals from their own wearables. We find tha...

Background Hearing loss (HL) affects 466 million people of all ages worldwide, with a rapidly increasing prevalence, and therefore requires appropriate public health policies. Multi-disciplinary approaches that make use of eHealth services can build the evidence to influence public policy. The European Union-funded project EVOTION developed a platf...

Prolonged acoustic noise negatively affects human cardiovascular health. However, noise is typically defined by acoustic intensity (i.e. pressure levels) alone, which neglect other dimensions of the sound associated with e.g. the ease of listening. In this study, we used in-market data from hearing aid users to investigate the longitudinal associat...

In audiological research, assessing daily-life benefit from hearing aid (HA) noise management (NM) is a challenge. While ecological momentary assessment (EMA) using smartphone-connected HAs has recently emerged as a promising tool for real-life data acquisition, there is a lack of research linking this method to established ones such as the SSQ12 q...

Ideally, public health policies are formulated from scientific data; however, policy-specific data are often unavailable. Big data can generate ecologically-valid, high-quality scientific evidence, and therefore has the potential to change how public health policies are formulated. Here, we discuss the use of big data for developing evidence-based...

People with hearing impairment find competing voices scenarios to be challenging, both with respect to switching attention from one talker to the other, as well as maintaining attention. With the Danish competing voices test (CVT) presented here, the dual-attention skills can be assessed. The CVT provides sentences spoken by three male and three fe...

Purpose: The scarcity of health care resources calls for their rational allocation, including within hearing health care. Policies define the course of action to reach specific goals such as optimal hearing health. The process of policy making can be divided into 4 steps: (a) problem identification and issue recognition, (b) policy formulation, (c...

Sensors in our phones and wearables, leave digital traces of our activities. With active user participation, these devices serve as personal sensing devices, giving insights to human behavior, thoughts, intents and personalities. We discuss how acoustical environment data from hearing aids, coupled with motion and location data from smartphones, ma...

Despite the technological advancement of modern hearing aids, many users leave their devices unused due to little perceived benefit. This problem arises from the limitations of the current fitting procedure that rarely takes into account 1) the perceptual differences between users not explained by measurable hearing loss characteristics and 2) the...

ntroduction: eHealth in audiology leads to a better interaction between people with hearing impairment and hearing care professionals and eventually allows patients with hearing impairments to actively support their treatment, rehabilitation and self-management. By using electronic means, for example through eHealth applications on smartphones of h...

The lack of individualized fitting of hearing aids results in many patients never getting the intended benefits, in turn causing the devices to be left unused in a drawer. However, living with an untreated hearing loss has been found to be one of the leading lifestyle related causes of dementia and cognitive decline. Taking a radically different ap...

The current paper summarises the research investigating associations between physiological data and hearing performance. An overview of state-of-the-art research and literature is given as well as promising directions for associations between physiological data and data regarding hearing loss and hearing performance. The physiological parameters in...

Hearables are on the rise as next generation wearables, capable of streaming audio, modifying soundscapes or functioning as biometric sensors. The recent introduction of IoT (Internet of things) connected hearing instruments offer new opportunities for hearables to collect behavioral data that capture device usage and user intents and thereby provi...

Poster presented at the 2017 CHI conference, Denver, CO, USA

The recent introduction of Internet connected hearing instruments offers a paradigm shift in hearing instrument fitting. Potentially this makes it possible for devices to adapt their settings to a changing context, inferred from user interactions. In a pilot study we enabled hearing instrument users to remotely enhance auditory focus and attenuate...

Old, hearing-impaired listeners generally benefit little from lateral separation of multiple talkers when listening to one of them. This study aimed to determine how spatial release from masking (SRM) in such listeners is affected when the interaural time differences(ITDs) in the temporal fine structure (TFS) are manipulated by tone-vocoding (TVC)...

The current paper summarises the research investigating associations between physiological data and hearing performance. An overview of state-of-the-art research and literature is given as well as promising directions for associations between physiological data and data regarding hearing loss and hearing performance. The physiological parameters in...

Sound source separation at low-latency requires that each incoming frame of audio data be processed at very low delay, and outputted as soon as possible. For practical purposes involving human listeners, a 20 ms algorithmic delay is the uppermost limit which is comfortable to the listener. In this paper, we propose a low-latency (algorithmic delay...

A new competing voices test paradigm to test spatial effects and algorithms in hearing aids. Poster presented at the International Hearing Aid Research Conference, IHCON, Lake Tahoe, California, US

Subjective evaluation of a low-latency supervised non-negative matrix factorization algorithm. Poster presented at the International Hearing Aid Research Conference, IHCON, Lake Tahoe, California

The effect of interleaved dichotic presentation in a competing voices test. Poster presented at the International Hearing Aid Research Conference, IHCON, Lake Tahoe, California, August 10-14

The present invention relates to a listening device for a hearing impaired person. The present invention furthermore relates to a corresponding operating method of operating a listening device and to a corresponding computer program. In particular, the present invention relates to a listening device that comprises a signal processing unit that is c...

A method of processes audio signals picked up from a sound field by a microphone system of a listening device adapted for being worn at a particular one of the left or right ear of a user, the sound field comprising sound signals from one or more sound sources, the sound signals impinging on the user from one or more directions relative to the user...

To examine behavioural and neural processing of pitch cues in adults with normal hearing (NH) and adults with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL). All participants completed a test of behavioural sensitivity to pitch cues using the TFS1 test (Moore and Sek, 2009a). Cortical potentials (N1, P2 and acoustic change complex) were recorded in response to...

A listening device comprises an input transducer providing an electric input signal comprising audio and a detector coupled to the input transducer, for determining whether the electric input signal is a broadband signal or not and providing a detection signal in response. The listening device furthermore comprises a controllable filter for filteri...

Competing voices are part of the everyday chal-lenges for a hearing aid user. In order to test the performance of hearing aids in this user scenario, a new type of speech test has to be developed. Compared to traditional tests, the competing voices test has two or more targets that are all important to follow and in the simplified case no masker. B...

Purpose: Frequency fluctuations in human voices can usually be described as coherent frequency modulation (FM). As listeners with hearing impairment (HI listeners) are typically less sensitive to FM than listeners with normal hearing (NH listeners), this study investigated whether hearing loss affects the perception of a sung vowel based on FM cue...

The measurement of sensitivity to temporal fine structure (TFS) in listeners can be measured by using a linear frequency-shift of a harmonic tone complex. However, the linear frequency shift of the harmonic tone complex breaks the harmonic structure, introducing a harmonic-inharmonic cue in addition to the pitch shift. In the present study, we inve...

A signal processing device comprising a signal processing unit for processing an electrical SPU-input signal comprising frequencies in the audible frequency range between a minimum frequency and a maximum frequency, and providing a processed SPU output signal. An FM to AM transformation unit transforms an FM2AM input signal originating from the SPU...

The invention relates to a method of operating an audio processing device. The invention further relates to an audio processing device, to a software program and to a medium having instructions stored thereon. The object of the present invention is to provide improvements in the processing of sounds in listening devices. The problem is solved by a...

Human vibrato is mainly characterized by two parameters: vibrato extent and vibrato rate. These parameters have been found to exhibit an interaction both in physical recordings of singers' voices and in listener's preference ratings. This study was concerned with the way in which the maximum acceptable vibrato excursion varies as a function of vibr...

The invention relates to a method of operating an audio processing device. The invention further relates to an audio processing device, to a software program and to a medium having instructions stored thereon. The object of the present invention is to provide improvements in the processing of sounds in listening devices. The problem is solved by a...

Eight normal-hearing and 23 hearing-impaired listeners were tested with the TFS1-test. The normal-hearing subjects obtained reliable TFS1 thresholds, but the hearing-impaired subjects failed the test. Although the TFS1-test may not measure individual variations in TFS sensitivity among hearing impaired, it has potential as a screening tool for hear...

We discuss condition monitoring based on mean field independent components analysis of acoustic emission energy signals. Within this framework, it is possible to formulate a generative model that explains the sources, their mixing and the noise statistics of the observed signals. Using a novelty detection approach based on normal-condition examples...

We have analyzed simple data fusion and preprocessing methods on Acoustic Emission measurements of prosthetic feets made of carbon fiber reinforced composites. This paper presents the initial research steps; aiming at reducing the time spent on the fa-tigue test. With a simple single feature probabilistic scheme we have showed that these methods ca...

We are developing a specialized toolbox for non-stationary condition monitoring of large 2-stroke diesel engines based on acoustic emission measurements. The main contribution of this toolbox has so far been the utilization of adaptive linear models such as Principal and Independent Component Analysis, as combined modeling and feature reduction met...

We present an event alignment framework which enables change detection in non-stationary signals. Classical condition monitoring frameworks have been restrained to laboratory settings with stationary operating conditions, which are not resembling real world operation. In this paper, we apply the technique for non-stationary condition monitoring of...

This work presents a new method for unsupervised change detection, which combines independent component modeling, and probabilistic outlier detection. The method further provides a compact data representation, which is amenable to interpretation, i.e., the detected condition changes can be investigated further. The method is successfully applied to...

Automatic detection and classification of operation conditions in large diesel engines is of significant importance. This paper investigates an independent component analysis (ICA) framework for unsupervised detection of changes in and possibly classification of operation conditions such as lubrication changes and increased wear based on acoust...

We have investigated the possibility of separating signals from a single mixture of sources. This problem is termed the Monaural Separation Problem. Lars Kai Hansen has argued that this problem is topological tougher than problems with multiple recordings. Roweis has shown that inference from a Factorial Hidden Markov Model, with non-stationary ass...