ARTOMIS: Objective and Ecological Measure of Speech Understanding in a Virtual Reality Environment

The current solutions for hearing impairment are hearing aids (HA), which are designed mainly to process speech in addition to processing other sounds in the user's environment. HAs require tuning in to optimize speech understanding and achieve satisfactory hearing outcomes for the user in daily life. The tuning process involves the use of speech intelligibility measurements to assess hearing outcomes; however, current methods of measuring speech intelligibility do not adequately address real-life scenarios. We propose to develop a more realistic measurement of speech intelligibility through the combination of two recently published methods. The first concept is the objective measure of speech intelligibility (OMSI), which is based on electroencephalography (EEG) recorded brain responses to speech. The second concept is the Audiovisual True-to-life Assessment of Auditory Rehabilitation (AVATAR), which is a virtual reality approach used to immerse a person in a realistic environment while measuring their speech intelligibility behaviorally. We have coined the combination of these two concepts as the audiovisual, realistic, and objective measurement for the intelligibility of speech (ARTOMIS). We will develop and evaluate the ARTOMIS with the goals of (1) showing ecological validity of the measure in both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners and (2) clinical translation of the ARTOMIS setup. The application of ARTOMIS should lead to improved hearing outcomes with HAs.