LM109 - An Audiologist's Primer to Artificial Intelligence

Abstract:
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a ubiquitous term in daily life, and hearing care is no exception. Audiologists are now fitting hearing aids and utilizing other tools that are based on AI in their routine clinical care. The rapid advancement of these tools and hearing aid algorithms has meant that few, if any, practicing audiologists received education about topics related to AI during their education. In this session, basic terminology of common AI approaches found in hearing care will be reviewed, with a focus on how to apply this knowledge to hearing aid selection and counseling.

Summary:
Audiologists have a complex role that sits at the intersection of social well-being, psychology, technology, and general healthcare. A holistic approach to hearing care is not just the selection of appropriate technology, but also the personalized counseling and attention to ensure a patient’s most important communication goals are addressed. To be effective in this role, it is key that audiologists understand how hearing aids operate independently from the promotional language used by manufacturers. Thankfully, AuD programs cover hearing aid signal processing in great detail, so that upon graduation, most audiologists have a strong grasp on how hearing aids process and amplify sound. However, many hearing aids now incorporate some form of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which has not been adequately addressed in AuD education until very recently, due to its rapid arrival onto the hearing healthcare scene.

AI has shown not only great promise in improving how hearing aids can support listening and communication, but also high potential to be misunderstood or mischaracterized. Terms such as “machine learning” and “deep neural networks” have entered into hearing aid marketing, and audiologists are now faced with the challenge of providing high quality clinical care, while also studying signal processing techniques that were niche academic endeavors just 10 years ago.

In this session, the terminology related to AI systems will be introduced, and the basic manner of operation for these systems will be reviewed. By demystifying AI, audiologists will have a better ability to critically evaluate new technologies and their associated marketing materials. Additionally, audiologists will have a better capacity to judge the positive and negative effects of the application of AI to hearing aid signal processing. Finally, having a deeper understanding of the underlying technology will allow audiologists to be more effective counsellors for patients during the hearing aid selection and fitting process.

Brief Summary of Clinical Takeaways:
The clinical takeaway for this session is a better understanding of how AI is applied to signal processing in hearing aids, empowering audiologists to provide better and more detailed counseling to their patients.