Preferred Name
Logan
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Date of Graduation
Spring 2019
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Audiology (AuD)
Department
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
Advisor(s)
Lincoln C. Gray
Bradley W. Kesse
Christopher G. Clinard
Abstract
Objective: Investigate the reliability of a custom-designed, portable, stereo-hearing testing system (as in the Ganev, 2017, Au.D. dissertation) when subjects self-administer two different stereo-hearing tasks at home. Results obtained under known and supervised conditions at a university clinic or lab versus unknown conditions at the participants’ homes were compared. Intra-subject comparison, and inter-subject trends, discerned the reliability of patient setup and self-administration of the two tasks.
Design: Ten subjects were evenly split among two conditions: five subjects each setup and self-administered the tasks first at home and then received direction in the clinic, and five received direction and did the tasks in the clinic first. In each condition, there were two stereo-hearing tasks. The first task was a localization assessment: participants attempted to identify the location of multiple short noise bursts from one of eight speakers in a horizontal array (random presentation). The second task was a speech-in-noise assessment: participants identified the color/number specification as presented by a speaker while a simultaneous, adaptive, noise presentation occurred. The speech-in-noise task repeated in four different fixed, locational configurations with at least 10 trials each.
Results: Testing at home was as good as testing in the clinic. Averaged localization errors were only 0.4 degrees (1/50th of the distance between test speakers) worse at home than in the clinic, and this difference was not significant (p>0.8). There was no difference in speech-in-noise thresholds at home versus clinic. There was no significant learning effect in either task; that is, no consistent difference between the first and second test. There was a significant location-by-order interaction in the localization test (p=0.04; with small effect size); participants who completed the task at home first performed better than those in the clinic.
Conclusion: Patients can reliably setup and self-administer the deployable stereo-hearing test system with no decrement in performance compared to those receiving supervised testing in a controlled environment. This validates the Ganev, 2017, dissertation and enables future use of this system to test stereo-hearing within patients’ homes. The marginally significance location-by-order interaction might indicate that being forced to learn first on your own is more effective.
Recommended Citation
Faust, Logan Grace, "The test-retest reliability of binaural-processing tasks at home versus a clinical environment" (2019). Dissertations, 2014-2019. 211.
https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/diss201019/211
