LiSN-S PGA The new benchmark in spatial speech-in-noise testing

Hearing care is not just about testing with pure tones or making sounds audible. Increasing speech intelligibility depends on so much more.

Cubex is one of the few audiology practices in the UK that test the cognitive processes related to hearing. Rather than just relying on a tonal stimulus to detect hearing, speech tests in quiet and in noise provide a much better 'Real World' perspective of a person's reduced hearing. This year we have enhanced this process with the inclusion of the LiSN-S PGA - The new benchmark in speech-in-noise testing. The Listening in Spatialized Noise - Sentences Test, or LiSN-S, assesses the ability of clients to understand speech when there is noise coming from different directions. This unique diagnostic tool allows us to accurately measure how well patients understand speech in noise, before recommending the hearing technology that best fits their needs. The LiSN-S prescribed gain amplifier (PGA) is an adaptive test that is administered under specially configured headphones (supplied) where stimuli are spatially separated in a virtual 3D world that intelligently mimicks a free field test set-up. Auditory input is extremely complex: rapidly changing acoustic events can contain everything from intricate timing cues, harmonics and loudness information to a phenomenal amount of information embedded in the frequency spectrum. The purpose of hearing care at Cubex is to help the brain restore order to what seems like chaos, using whatever sources of information are available, including: visual cues, situational cues and acoustic information such as spatial cues and speech characteristics. When listening in a complex environment with many different sound sources, our cognitive system automatically tries to separate them. Once they are isolated, we can then apply our attention to the specific sound stream we're most interested in and set competing sounds aside. We cannot selectively attend to the source that we find most interesting until we organize every sound source in our environment. The brain is wired to absorb all of the sensory information around us and to organise it into meaningful percepts. It untangles and separates different sound sources - such as one voice from another; sounds coming from the kitchen versus sounds coming from the TV in the next room; traffic noise versus playground noise, etc. Nature has endowed the auditory system with an ability to interpret sounds in a three-step process. First, it organises the soundscape, an ability that is fundamental to speech understanding. This accomplished, the brain can then select the signal of greatest interest - such as human speech - while suppressing (but not eliminating) other sounds in the environment. It will then follow that signal over time. Understanding how hearing loss disrupts this process is essential for recommendation of appropriate cognition friendly amplification. The LiSN-S PGA allows us to easily assess a patient's spatial processing ability and determine how much difficulty they are likely to experience understanding speech in background noise. In addition to providing valuable information to help with hearing aid selection, the results of the test are also used for setting realistic patient expectations prior to hearing aid fitting and in determining when higher levels of technology may be needed. Please contact us to arrange a demo of LiSN-S PGA with one of our Audiologists