German Research Foundation supports a new project at Oldenburg University
Research
Dr. Anna Warzybok, physicist and audiology researcher based in Oldenburg, northern Germany, has made it her objective to test people with hearing loss from various countries and to harmonize clinical standards, thereby promoting optimal international care practices for hearing aids.
Warzybok works in the Medical Physics Department of Faculty VI Medicine and Health Science and in the “Hearing4all” excellence cluster of Oldenburg University. For her project, she recently received a grant of 500,000 Euros from the German Research Foundation (DFG).
“This funding commitment highlights the outstanding work of our up-and-coming scientists. We congratulate Anna Warzybok on this success,” says University president Prof. Hans Michael Piper. “Through her project, Anna Warzybok is providing an important contribution to promoting international compatible audiology, hearing diagnosis and rehabilitation with hearing aids – for the benefit of many patients,” adds Prof. Birger Kollmeier, spokesperson for the Hearing4all excellence cluster.
Matrix tests in several languages in order to compare different countries
The title of the project is “Multilingual model-based rehabilitative audiology” for which Warzybok, who is a post-doc, is both applicant and coordinator. She will now spend the next three years measuring speech understanding in people with hearing loss from several different countries, with the aim of developing internationally applicable test procedures. To measure speech understandability, Anna Warzybok will use standardized audiology tests, so-called matrix tests in several languages, which enable comparisons of results from different countries.
In addition, she will use the tests to model speech understandability through automatic speech recognition. The results should serve to predict the best possible hearing system settings for patients. The project follows an interdisciplinary approach and is being carried out in close cooperation with world-leading hospitals and research centers in the United States, Italy, Poland and Russia.
Source: Audio Infos Germany
