ACALES - briefly explained
ACALES (Adaptive CAtegorical Listening Effort Scaling) is a measurement procedure for hearing care professionals and audiologists to record subjective listening effort. In addition to the comparison of alternative hearing systems and their settings, the measurement procedure enables progress monitoring as well as the verification of acclimatization to the hearing systems.
Hearing effort - What is it?
A social evening in a restaurant, a large family celebration or an excursion - who doesn't know it, conversations in noisy environments are perceived as more strenuous than in a quiet environment.
In most situations where people understand most of what is being said, but speak with an increased hearing effort, the speech volume is higher than the volume of the ambient noise. Although high individual speech intelligibility can be achieved, hearing-impaired individuals in particular report that it takes a great deal of effort to achieve this speech intelligibility. But how can this subjectively perceived so-called hearing effort be measured individually? With ACALES!
ACALES - this is how it works
The ACALES measurement method makes it possible to measure the mental 'listening load' or listening effort that a person has to expend in order to understand speech in noise. This is an additional dimension to speech intelligibility. In measuring subjective listening effort, the patient/client rates how strenuous it is to follow a speaker in noise using a 13-point scale ranging from 'effortless' to 'extremely effortful'. The measurement of subjective listening effort is particularly suitable when speech intelligibility measurements cannot show any differences between the hearing systems or the maximum of 100% speech understanding has been reached. With the help of ACALES, the client evaluates both everyday and challenging listening situations. Furthermore, the subjective added value of comfort features such as noise algorithms or directional microphones can be measured.
Prices
Basic price 19.99 € per month Updates included. Annual payment possible.
System requirements
- PC/laptop, CPU, working and hard disk space, sound card
- loudspeaker
- Tablet PC or cell phone
- PC/laptop with Microsoft ® Windows ® 7 or higher
- CPU (at least 1.6 GHz clock frequency)
- working memory (at least 4 GB)
- hard disk space (at least 250 MB)
- soundcard
- loudspeakers (at least 1 loudspeaker 0°) recommended are two loudspeakers (0° and 135°)
- optional: tablet PC or cell phone for answer input by the customer
- internet connection.
A test version can be downloaded under "Download".
