We are excited to have you join us for an amazing educational line up, check out the agenda below for the 2025 Conference. Please note that this agenda is subject to change.
While protection against high-level noise remains the primary purpose of hearing protection devices (HPDs), auditory situational awareness is also very important to maintain safety at work and to ensure acceptance to wear HPDs. One important factor is speech intelligibility in face-to-face communication, which may be impaired due to the HPD’s sound attenuation. To facility speech perception in conditions with temporarily lower noise levels, level-dependent HPDs offer acoustic transparency or even amplification of environmental sounds to prevent the users to take off their HPDs when attempting to communicate. To evaluate the benefits of such speech enhancing features, conducting formal listening tests is the gold standard. However, subjective testing is time-consuming and costly, and therefore instrumental metrics which accurately predict the outcome of such listening tests would be desirable. This study reviews recent advances in the development of such instrumental metrics and illustrates how they can be applied the context of HPDs. The focus is on level-dependent HPDs, which cannot be assessed using model approaches assuming linear audio signal processing. The contribution will illustrate application examples of benchmarking different HPDs, and demonstrate the potential of current models for real-time assessment of speech intelligibility in dynamically changing acoustic conditions.
