Active Public Health & Healthcare

Measuring impaired and aided loudness via simple auditory reaction times

Funder RNID Charity-funded
Recipient organisation University College London
Funding £97K
Period Oct 2025 — Sept 2028

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A simple finger tap in response to a beep could replace the button-pressing and verbal reports that hearing-impaired patients currently use to tell audiologists how loud a sound feels. Current hearing tests rely on patients consciously judging loudness, which is subjective and varies from person to person. Reaction time—how quickly someone presses a button after hearing a tone—has already been shown to track loudness reliably in normal-hearing people and in trained animals. But systematic studies with hearing-impaired listeners are missing. This project fills that gap by testing whether reaction-time measurements work for people with hearing loss, for sounds heard through both ears, and for complex broadband noises. If the correlation holds, audiologists could use reaction times to fit hearing aids more precisely, tailoring settings to each patient’s suprathreshold hearing rather than relying on self-reported comfort levels. In the longer term, the approach could be automated—sensors in hearing aids or smartphones might estimate loudness from reaction time without requiring any conscious input from the user. The third part of the study also asks whether ageing itself changes the relationship between loudness and reaction time, which would affect how the method is applied in older populations.

View original technical description
Simple auditory reaction time has been shown to be a correlate of loudness in normal-hearing listeners. The correlation held for all factors of loudness, including intensity, frequency, spectral loudness summation and binaural loudness summation. For this reason, reaction times have been used to measure equal-loudness contours in trained animals, for example cats, rats and harbour porpoises. However, larger systematic studies with hearing-impaired participants are still missing, despite the fact that reaction time is less prone to individual biases than loudness evaluations that need conscious judgments. With the present project we aim to overcome this gap so that reaction times can be used to characterise a hearing loss based on suprathreshold sounds, and to fit and verify hearing-aid settings. The project will consist of three parts. In the first part we will study the equivalence of equal-reaction-time contours and equal-loudness contours in impaired hearing. In the second study, we will focus to use reaction time for binaural loudness summation and broadband sounds with the aim to provide more individualised hearing-aid fittings. In the third part, we will study if the effect of age interacts with the effect of loudness on reaction time. By investigating the correlation between reaction time and loudness in hearing-impaired listeners, and possible limitations, we hope that the paradigm will be used in extended clinical hearing tests, and in the long term possibly also by sensors that are able to automatically obtain an estimate of reaction time and thus loudness.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Josef Schlittenlacher (EPMC Awardee)

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Original classification

PhD Studentship

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