Tobias Neher

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Verified

Tobias verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD
• Professor at University of Southern Denmark

OBJECTIVES: Many hearing aid (HA) users receive limited benefit from amplification, especially when trying to understand speech in noise, and they often report hearing-related residual activity limitations. Current HA fitting strategies are typically based on pure-tone hearing thresholds only, even though suprathreshold factors have been linked to...

A key factor influencing sound quality in open-fit digital hearing aids is the processing delay. So far, the delay limit needed for ensuring optimal (rather than tolerable) sound quality has not been established. Using a realistic hearing aid simulator, the current study investigated the relationship between preferred sound quality and five process...

Objective: To explore if experience with hearing aid (HA) amplification affects speech-evoked cortical potentials reflecting comprehension abilities. Design: N400 and late positive complex (LPC) responses as well as behavioural response times to congruent and incongruent digit triplets were measured. The digits were presented against stationary sp...

Hearing aids provide nonlinear amplification to improve speech audibility and loudness perception. While more audibility typically increases speech intelligibility at low levels, the same is not true for above-conversational levels, where decreases in intelligibility (“rollover”) can occur. In a previous study, we found rollover in speech intelligi...

Using the Danish 'børneDAT' corpus, the current study aimed to (1) collect normative masked speech recognition data for 6-13-year-olds in conditions with and without interaural difference cues, (2) evaluate the test-retest reliability of these measurements , and (3) compare two widely used measures of binaural/spatial benefit in terms of the obtain...

Objectives Otitis media (OM) is among the most common childhood diseases. Many studies have suggested that recurrent OM episodes during early childhood can have long-lasting adverse effects on essentially every level of the auditory system. However, the literature on this topic is heterogeneous and results are mixed. Hence, a need exists to structu...

Objective: To describe application scenarios of a mobile device that provides a practical means for showcasing potential hearing aid benefits. Design: A prototype of a hearing aid demonstrator based on circumaural headphones and a mobile signal processing platform was developed, providing core functions of a hearing aid, including several gain p...

In open-fit digital hearing aids (HAs), the processing delay influences comb-filter effects that arise from the interaction of the processed HA sound with the unprocessed direct sound. The current study investigated potential relations between preferred processing delay, spectral and temporal processing abilities, and self-reported listening habits...

Objective: Open-source hearing aid (HA) research tools provide avenues for testing new audiological concepts. This study compared a wearable research HA (RHA) - the "Portable Hearing Laboratory" - to a high-end commercial HA (CHA) in terms of aided outcome. Using this RHA, it also evaluated a fitting approach based on non-individualised gain prese...

Objective: To investigate speech recognition in school-age children with early-childhood otitis media (OM) in conditions with noise or speech maskers with or without interaural differences. To also investigate the effects of three otologic history factors. Design: Using headphone presentation, speech recognition thresholds (SRTs) were measured w...

Introduction: Cochlear implant (CI) users differ greatly in their rehabilitation outcomes, including speech understanding in noise. This variability may be related to brain changes associated with intact senses recruiting cortical areas from stimulation-deprived senses. Numerous studies have demonstrated such cross-modal reorganization in individu...

Negativity bias is a cognitive bias that results in negative events being perceptually more salient than positive ones. For hearing care, this means that hearing aid benefits can potentially be overshadowed by adverse experiences. Research has shown that sustaining focus on positive experiences has the potential to mitigate negativity bias. The pur...

Background: Although hearing aids (HAs) can compensate for reduced audibility, functional outcomes and benefits vary widely across individuals. As part of the Danish ‘Better hEAring Rehabilitation’ (BEAR) project, four distinct auditory profiles differing in terms of audiometric thresholds and supra-threshold hearing abilities were recently identif...

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) can provide insights into the real-world auditory ecology of hearing aid (HA) users. To better understand what factors, influence the real-world listening experiences of this population, more detailed models of human auditory ecology and behavior are needed. Laboratory studies suggest that p...

Objective: To investigate the effects of previous occupational noise exposure in older adults with hearing loss on (1) audiometric configuration and acoustic reflex (AR) thresholds and (2) self-reported hearing abilities and hearing aid (HA) effectiveness. Design: A prospective observational study. Study sample: The study included 1176 adults...

Background and aim: In open-fit hearing aids (HAs), the processing delay is crucial for the perceived sound quality, as it determines the magnitude of the comb-filtering effect that occurs when the direct and processed sound interact. Research has shown individual differences in the preferred length of this processing delay. This study investigated...

Hearing aids provide level-dependent gain to improve speech audibility. While more audibility typically leads to better speech intelligibility at low levels, several studies have found that at high levels increasing the presentation level can lead to decreased intelligibility. Termed rollover, this phenomenon has been observed in listeners with nor...

To provide clinical guidance in hearing aid prescription for older adults with presbycusis, we investigated differences in self-reported hearing abilities and hearing aid effectiveness for premium or basic hearing aid users. Secondly, as an explorative analysis, we investigated if differences in gain prescription verified with real-ear measurements...

Purpose While speech audibility generally improves with increasing level, declines in intelligibility are inconsistently observed at above-conversational levels, even in listeners with normal audiograms (NAs). The inconsistent findings could be due to different types of speech materials, ranging from monosyllabic words to everyday sentences, used a...

In crowded social settings, listeners often face the challenge of following a conversation in the presence of other conversations. Several factors influence the difficulty of this task, including the number of talkers, the amount of reverberation, and the hearing status. Beamformers in hearing aids have the potential to mitigate these factors by im...

People with hearing difficulties often wait many years before they start using hearing aids, even though sooner treatment could lead to better outcomes. Reasons for deferring hearing aid treatment include, among others, overestimation of own hearing abilities and underestimation of the benefit provided by modern hearing aids [1]. One possibility to...

High-intensity environmental noise is known to be detrimental to cardiovascular health. However, individual differences have not been considered, and reported effects cannot be generalized to noise levels reflecting everyday life. Here, we explore the relationship between daily-life sound exposure and heart rate with longitudinal data from ten indi...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2021.724007.].

Effective communication requires good speech perception abilities. Speech perception can be assessed with behavioral and electrophysiological methods. Relating these two types of measures to each other can provide a basis for new clinical tests. In audiological practice, speech detection and discrimination are routinely assessed, whereas comprehens...

(1) Background: To improve hearing-aid rehabilitation, the Danish ‘Better hEAring Rehabilitation’ (BEAR) project recently developed methods for individual hearing loss characterization and hearing-aid fitting. Four auditory profiles differing in terms of audiometric hearing loss and supra-threshold hearing abilities were identified. To enable audit...

Hearing aids (HA) are the most common type of rehabilitation treatment for age-related hearing loss. However, HA users often obtain limited benefit from their devices, particularly in noisy environments, and thus many HA candidates do not use them at all. A possible reason for this could be that current HA fittings are audiogram-based, that is, the...

High-intense environmental noise is detrimental to cardiovascular health. However, individual differences have not been considered, and reported effects cannot be generalized to noise levels reflecting everyday life. Here we explore the relationship between daily-life sound exposure and heart rate with longitudinal data from young normal hearing in...

Objective: Previous research has linked recurrent otitis media (OM) during early childhood to reduced binaural masking level differences (BMLDs) in school-age children. How this finding relates to monaural processing abilities and the individual otologic history has not been investigated systematically. The current study, therefore, addressed these...

The Better hEAring Rehabilitation (BEAR) project aims to provide a new clinical profiling tool—a test battery—for hearing loss characterization. Although the loss of sensitivity can be efficiently measured using pure-tone audiometry, the assessment of supra-threshold hearing deficits remains a challenge. In contrast to the classical “attenuation-di...

Hearing aid (HA) users differ greatly in their speech-in-noise (SIN) outcomes. This could be because the degree to which current HA fittings can address individual listening needs differs across users and listening situations. In two earlier studies, an auditory test battery and a data-driven method were developed for classifying HA candidates into...

Background—The clinical characterization of hearing deficits for hearing-aid fitting purposes is typically based on the pure-tone audiogram only. In a previous study, a group of hearing-impaired listeners completed a comprehensive test battery that was designed to tap into different dimensions of hearing abilities. A data-driven analysis of the dat...

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate real-life benefit from directional microphone and noise reduction (“noise management” [NM]) processing using retrospective self-reports and smartphone-based ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) combined with logging of the acoustic environments. Method A single-blinded, counterbalanced crosso...

The sources and consequences of a sensorineural hearing loss are diverse. While several approaches have aimed at disentangling the physiological and perceptual consequences of different etiologies, hearing deficit characterization and rehabilitation have been dominated by the results from pure-tone audiometry. Here, we present a novel approach base...

Effective hearing aid (HA) rehabilitation requires personalization of the HA fitting parameters, but in current clinical practice only the gain prescription is typically individualized. To optimize the fitting process, advanced HA settings such as noise reduction and microphone directionality can also be tailored to individual hearing deficits. In...

For the audiological assessment of the speech-in-noise abilities of children with normal or impaired hearing, appropriate test materials are required. However, in Denmark, no standardized materials exist. The purpose of this study was to develop a Danish sentence corpus suitable for testing school-age children. Based on the 600 validated test sente...

Currently, clinical characterization of hearing deficits for hearing-aid fitting is based on the pure-tone audiogram. Implicitly, this assumes that the audiogram can predict performance in complex, supra-threshold tasks. Sanchez-Lopez et al. (2018) hypothesized that the hearing deficits of a given listener, both at threshold and supra-threshold lev...

Recently, a number of studies have indicated that recurrent or chronic middle-ear disease during early childhood may lead to long-term supra-threshold hearing deficits. The current study followed up on this by investigating differences in monaural and binaural hearing abilities in noise among school-age children with or without a history of middle-...

For the audiological assessment of the speech-in-noise abilities of children with normal or impaired hearing, an appropriate test material is required. However, there is no standardized speech material for children in Denmark. The purpose of the current study was to develop a Danish sentence material suitable for school-age children. Based on the 6...

Arguably, the next frontier in hearing aid (HA) development are devices that can infer (or learn) the needs of the user via non-invasive physiological measurements such as electroencephalography (EEG) and adjust themselves accordingly. A promising approach to translating EEG signals into HA control signals is the analysis of EEG impulse responses t...

Objective: The clinical characterization of hearing deficits for hearing-aid fitting purposes is typically based on the pure-tone audiogram only. In a previous study, a group of hearing-impaired listeners were tested using a comprehensive test battery designed to tap into different aspects of hearing. A data-driven analysis of the data yielded four...

Using a hearing aid simulator and virtual acoustics, Neher et al. (2017) recently showed that binaural hearing abilities influence speech-in-noise reception through different bilateral directional processing schemes. The current study aimed to extend this finding to real acoustic environments and commercial devices. Three beamforming schemes were t...

Data-driven profiling allows uncovering complex hidden structures in a dataset and has been used as a diagnostic tool in various fields of work. In audiology, the clinical characterization of hearing deficits for hearing-aid fitting is typically based on the pure-tone audiogram only. Implicitly, this relies on the assumption that the audiogram can...

The current study forms part of the Better hEAring Rehabilitation (BEAR) project, which aims at developing new clinical tools for characterizing individual hearing loss and for assessing hearing-aid (HA) benefit. Its purpose was to investigate potential interactions between four auditory profiles and three measures of HA outcome obtained for six HA...

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...

The Better hEAring Rehabilitation (BEAR) project aims to provide a new clinical profiling tool, a test battery, for hearing loss characterization. Whereas the loss of sensitivity can be efficiently measured using pure-tone audiometry, the assessment of supra-threshold hearing deficits remains a challenge. In contrast to the classical attenuation-di...

Currently, clinical characterization of hearing deficits for hearing-aid fitting is based on the pure-tone audiogram only. Implicitly, this assumes that the audiogram can predict performance on complex, supra-threshold tasks. Sanchez-Lopez et al. (Trends in Hearing, Vol. 22, 2018) hypothesized that the hearing deficits of a given listener, both at...

This repository contains raw and processed data used and described in: R. Sanchez-Lopez, S.G. Nielsen, M. El-Haj-Ali, F. Bianchi, M, Fereckzowski, O. Cañete, M. Wu, T. Neher, T. Dau and S. Santurette (under review). ``Auditory tests for characterizing hearing deficits: The BEAR test battery,'' Int. J. of Audiology. [Preprint available in medRxiv:...

The current study forms part of the Better hEAring Rehabilitation (BEAR) project, which aims to develop and evaluate new clinical tools for individual hearing loss characterization and hearing aid (HA) benefit assessment. The purpose of the current study was to assess the interaction between four different auditory profiles and two measures of hear...

One aim of the Better hEAring Rehabilitation (BEAR) project is to define a new clinical profiling tool, a test battery, for individualized hearing loss characterization. Recently, Sanchez-Lopez et al. (2019) proposed a test battery that includes six types of measures: audibility, middle-ear analysis, speech perception, binaural-processing abilities...

The current study forms part of the Better hEAring Rehabilitation (BEAR) project, which aims at developing new clinical tools for characterizing individual hearing loss and for assessing hearing-aid (HA) benefit. Its purpose was to investigate potential interactions between four auditory profiles and three measures of HA outcome obtained for six HA...

Recently, evidence has been accumulating that untreated hearing loss can lead to neurophysiological changes that affect speech processing abilities in noise. To shed more light on how aiding may impact these effects, this study explored the influence of hearing aid (HA) experience on the cognitive processes underlying speech comprehension. Eye-trac...

Objective: It has been suggested that the next major advancement in hearing aid (HA) technology needs to include cognitive feedback from the user to control HA functionality. In order to enable automatic brainwave-steered HA adjustments, attentional processes underlying speech-in-noise perception in aided hearing-impaired individuals need to be be...

Hearing loss can negatively influence the spatial hearing abilities of hearing-impaired listeners, not only in static but also in dynamic auditory environments. Therefore, ways of addressing these deficits with advanced hearing aid algorithms need to be investigated. In a previous study based on virtual acoustics and a computer simulation of differ...

Background The Better hEAring Rehabilitation (BEAR) project pursues the development and assessment of new clinically feasible strategies for individual hearing-loss diagnosis and hearing-aid fitting. The aim is to improve the current clinical practice, where the fitting process relies on the pure-tone audiogram and trial-and-error methods, which us...

The Better hEAring Rehabilitation (BEAR) project pursues the development and evaluation of new clinically feasible strategies for individual hearing loss diagnosis and hearing aid fitting. Two essential elements of this research are the design of a new diagnostic test battery for identifying different auditory profiles and linking those profiles to...

Hearing-impaired listeners are known to have difficulties not only with understanding speech in noise but also with judging source distance and movement, and these deficits are related to perceived handicap. It is possible that the perception of spatially dynamic sounds can be improved with hearing aids (HAs), but so far this has not been investiga...

Hearing-aid users have reported an increased satisfaction since digital technology and advanced signal processing became available in hearing aids. However, many users still experience difficulties in noisy environments and in complex listening scenarios. Although numerous parameters can be adjusted to provide an individualized hearing solution, he...

Elderly listeners are known to differ considerably in their ability to understand speech in noise. Several studies have addressed the underlying factors that contribute to these differences. These factors include audibility, and age-related changes in supra-threshold auditory processing abilities, and it has been suggested that differences in cogni...

Objective: Research findings concerning the relation between benefit from hearing aid (HA) noise suppression and working memory function are inconsistent. The current study thus investigated the effects of three noise suppression algorithms on auditory working memory and the relation with reading span. Design: Using a computer simulation of bila...

Previous research has shown that hearing aid users can differ substantially in their preference for noise reduction (NR) strength, and that preference for and speech recognition with NR processing typically are not correlated (e.g. Neher 2014; Serman et al. 2016). In other words: hearing aid users may prefer a certain NR setting, but perform better...

The influence of hearing aid (HA) signal processing on the perception of spatially dynamic sounds has not been systematically investigated so far. Previously, we observed that interfering sounds impaired the detectability of left-right source movements and reverberation that of near-far source movements for elderly hearing-impaired (EHI) listeners...

Speech understanding in noise (SiN) is important but demanding for hearing-impaired persons Amplification and noise reduction (NR) are supposed to help, but hearing aid (HA) users can respond very differently to them The relation between preference for and performance with NR algorithms is not clear (e.g. Neher 2014; Serman et al. 2016), nor is the...

Speech understanding in noise (SiN) is an important but demanding daily-life situation Manufacturers´point of view: What is best processing strategy in such situations? There is a relation between speech perception, esp. SiN, of hearing- impaired listeners, and the ability to manipulate and store sensory information (e.g. Akeroyd, 2008; Rönnberg et...

Objectives: Using a longitudinal design, the present study sought to substantiate indications from two previous cross-sectional studies that hearing aid (HA) experience leads to improved speech processing abilities as quantified using eye-gaze measurements. Another aim was to explore potential concomitant changes in event-related potentials (ERPs)...

In contrast to static sounds, spatially dynamic sounds have received little attention in psychoacoustic research so far. This holds true especially for acoustically complex (reverberant, multisource) conditions and impaired hearing. The current study therefore investigated the influence of reverberation and the number of concurrent sound sources on...

Hearing aid (HA) users can differ markedly in their benefit from directional processing (or beamforming) algorithms. The current study therefore investigated candidacy for different bilateral directional processing schemes. Groups of elderly listeners with symmetric (N = 20) or asymmetric (N = 19) hearing thresholds for frequencies below 2 kHz, a l...

Objective: To investigate the influence of an algorithm designed to enhance or magnify interaural difference cues on speech signals in noisy, spatially complex conditions using both technical and perceptual measurements. To also investigate the combination of interaural magnification (IM), monaural microphone directionality (DIR), and binaural coh...

To scrutinize the binaural contribution to speech-in-noise reception, four groups of elderly participants with or without audiometric asymmetry <2 kHz and with or without near-normal binaural intelligibility level difference (BILD) completed tests of monaural and binaural phase sensitivity as well as cognitive function. Groups did not differ in age...

Even though hearing aid (HA) users can respond very differently to noise reduction (NR) processing, knowledge about possible drivers of this variability (and thus ways of addressing it in HA fittings) is sparse. The current study investigated differences in preferred NR strength among HA users. Participants were groups of experienced users with cle...

This study assessed the effects of hearing aid (HA) experience on how quickly a participant can grasp the meaning of an acoustic sentence-in-noise stimulus presented together with two similar pictures that either correctly (target) or incorrectly (competitor) depict the meaning conveyed by the sentence. Using an eye tracker, the time taken by the p...

Background: A better understanding of individual differences in hearing aid (HA) outcome is a prerequisite for more personalized HA fittings. Currently, knowledge of how different user factors relate to response to directional processing (DIR) and noise reduction (NR) is sparse. Purpose: To extend a recent study linking preference for DIR and NR...

Working memory—the ability to process and store information—has been identified as an important aspect of speech perception in difficult listening environments. Working memory can be envisioned as a limited-capacity system which is engaged when an input signal cannot be readily matched to a stored representation or template. This “mismatch” is expe...

Knowledge of how executive functions relate to preferred hearing aid (HA) processing is sparse and seemingly inconsistent with related knowledge for speech recognition outcomes. This study thus aimed to find out if (1) performance on a measure of reading span (RS) is related to preferred binaural noise reduction (NR) strength, (2) similar relations...

Objectives: In a previous study, ) investigated whether pure-tone average (PTA) hearing loss and working memory capacity (WMC) modulate benefit from different binaural noise reduction (NR) settings. Results showed that listeners with smaller WMC preferred strong over moderate NR even at the expense of poorer speech recognition due to greater speec...

One of the aims of the focused research group "Individualized hearing acoustics" are elements of an assistive listening device that both fits the requirements of near-to-normal listeners (i.e., providing benefit in noisy situations or other daily life acoustical challenges) and, in addition, can be scaled up to a complete hearing aid for a more sub...

Seit einigen Jahren häufen sich die Befunde, dass es eine große Variabilität im Nutzen verschiedener Hörgeräteeinstellungen für Hörgeschädigte gibt. Diese lassen sich nur zum Teil mit Unterschieden im Hörverlust, im Alter und in der Gewöhnung erklären. Daher sind weitere individuelle Faktoren in den Fokus der Forschung gerückt. Der Einfluss kogniti...

Studies investigating speech-on-speech masking effects commonly use closed-set speech materials such as the coordinate response measure [Bolia et al. (2000). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 107, 1065-1066]. However, these studies typically result in very low (i.e., negative) speech recognition thresholds (SRTs) when the competing speech signals are spatially s...

Although previous research indicates that cognitive skills influence benefit from different types of hearing aid algorithms, comparatively little is known about the role of, and potential interaction with, hearing loss. This holds true especially for noise reduction (NR) processing. The purpose of the present study was thus to explore whether degre...

The potential benefits of preserving high-frequency spectral cues created by the pinna in hearing-aid fittings were investigated in a combined laboratory and field test. In a single-blind crossover design, two settings of an experimental hearing aid were compared. One setting was characterized by a pinna cue-preserving microphone position, whereas...

The relationships between spatial speech recognition (SSR; the ability to understand speech in complex spatial environments), binaural temporal fine structure (TFS) sensitivity, and three cognitive tasks were assessed for 17 hearing-impaired listeners. Correlations were observed between SSR, TFS sensitivity, and two of the three cognitive tasks, wh...

This study aimed to clarify the basic auditory and cognitive processes that affect listeners' performance on two spatial listening tasks: sound localization and speech recognition in spatially complex, multi-talker situations. Twenty-three elderly listeners with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing impairments were tested on the two spatial liste...