DFG supports new research project in Oldenburg

Oldenburg. Testing hearing impaired people from different countries, standardizing clinical standards and establishing optimal international support for hearing aids - that is the goal of Oldenburger physicist and audiologist Dr. Anna Warzybok. The postdoctoral student from the Department of Medical Physics at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences and the Cluster of Excellence "Hearing4all" at the University of Oldenburg receives approx. 500.000 euros from the German Research Foundation (DFG) for this task.

"This grant also underscores the outstanding work of our young scientists. We congratulate Anna Warzybok on this success ", explains University President Prof. Dr. Dr. Michael Piper. "Anna Warzybok is making an important contribution to establishing an internationally compatible speech audiology, hearing diagnosis and hearing aid support - for the well-being of many patients," adds Prof. Dr. Dr. Birger Kollmeier, speaker of the Cluster of Excellence "Hearing4all".

"Multilingual model-based rehabilitative audiology" is the title of the project, in which Warzybok is both the applicant and coordinator. For the next three years, the young scientist will measure the language comprehension of hearing-impaired people in various countries and will build up internationally applicable test methods. For measuring speech intelligibility, Warzybok uses standardized audiological tests - so-called matrix tests - in different languages, which allow a cross-country comparison of the results. The audiologist will also use the tests to model speech intelligibility by means of automatic speech recognition. The results should be used to predict the best possible hearing aid settings for patients.

The project is interdisciplinary and is realized in close cooperation with the world's leading clinics and research centers. Involved Organizations are located, for example, in Italy, Poland, Russia and the USA.

[Original text: Uni-Pressemitteilung, 01.03.2017]