This is a PhD studentship awarded to Dr Emma Holmes at University College London. Bindiya Patel started her PhD in October 2025.
Background
Many people with hearing loss struggle to understand speech in noisy places. This can cause them to avoid social situations. They might steer clear of a busy restaurant or have difficulty following conversations with their friends and family. These difficulties may increase a person’s risk of social isolation, depression and dementia. Hearing aids can make it easier for people to understand speech in quiet places but hearing aid users generally still have difficulty in noisy places.
Aims
Bindiya will investigate whether auditory training (listening tasks which aim to improve the brain’s ability to process sound) can help people with age-related hearing loss to understand speech in noisy places.
Research methods
Bindiya will study two new types of auditory training that have never been tested in people with age-related hearing loss. These new approaches differ from previous auditory training programmes because they target specific auditory processes in the brain.
Bindiya will test both approaches in people with age-related hearing loss, then choose the most promising approach to develop further in their project. They will also collaborate with a focus group of people with hearing loss to develop a mobile training app, asking for their opinions on what would make up an achievable training protocol.
Finally, they will test the co-developed training protocol in a large number of people with age-related hearing loss, measuring improvements in speech understanding in these people. They will also examine if training helps to relieve some of the effort of listening in noisy places, and how the effects of training vary among people.
Benefit
Auditory training holds great potential to improve communication in noisy places. However, we need to find new approaches that provide robust benefits for people with hearing loss.