{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.017253774263120056, 'fraction_numerical': 0.002875629043853343, 'mean_word_length': 5.298642533936651, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Study measures user benefit of two modern hearing aid features

As hearing aid technology advances, the hearing instrument is evolving more and more into a “hearing system.” The main objective of complex digital signal processing in a hearing system is to improve speech intelligibility in any acoustic environment. Besides that, improvements in other hearing aid features have also been developed. For example, the modern hearing system should provide speech intelligibility with a pleasant tone and at a comfortable level. Cosmetic appearance should be high while operation of the instrument should be easy. The hearing healthcare professional is constantly being given more tools for (interactive) fitting and fine-tuning of these complex hearing systems. Because of the high cost of hearing aid development, it is imperative to measure the efficiency of newly developed features and their benefit to the user. This paper will review the results of a clinical study of 20 subjects who tested two new features of the Phonak Claro 22 digital hearing instrument: the Loudness Perception Profile, an in situ categorical loudness scaling procedure designed to obtain an individual hearing aid pre-fitting based on measures, not estimates, of loudness recruitment, and the AutoSelect mode, which switches automatically between two programs to select the better one for the acoustical situation.