HearMeVirtual Reality: Using Virtual Reality to Facilitate Empathy Between Hearing Impaired Children and Their Parents

Lasse Embøl, Carl Hutters, Andreas Junker, Daniel Reipur, Ali Adjorlu, Rolf Nordahl, Stefania Serafin*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)
39 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Cochlear implants (CI) enable hearing in individuals with sensorineural hearing loss, albeit with difficulties in speech perception and sound localization. In noisy environments, these difficulties are disproportionately greater for CI users than for children with no reported hearing loss. Parents of children with CIs are motivated to experience what CIs sound like, but options to do so are limited. This study proposes using virtual reality to simulate having CIs in a school setting with two contrasting settings: a noisy playground and a quiet classroom. To investigate differences between hearing conditions, an evaluation utilized a between-subjects design with 15 parents (10 female, 5 male; age M = 38.5, SD = 6.6) of children with CIs with no reported hearing loss. In the virtual environment, a word recognition and sound localization test using an open-set speech corpus compared differences between simulated unilateral CI, simulated bilateral CI, and normal hearing conditions in both settings. Results of both tests indicate that noise influences word recognition more than it influences sound localization, but ultimately affects both. Furthermore, bilateral CIs are equally to or significantly beneficial over having a simulated unilateral CI in both tests. A follow-up qualitative evaluation showed that the simulation enabled users to achieve a better understanding of what it means to be an hearing impaired child.

Original languageEnglish
Article number691984
JournalFrontiers in Virtual Reality
Volume2
ISSN2673-4192
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 16 Jun 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2021 Embøl, Hutters, Junker, Reipur, Adjorlu, Nordahl and Serafin.

Keywords

  • cochlear implants
  • empathy
  • hearing loss
  • simulation
  • virtual reality

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