Announcing the 2017 RFP: "The impact of audiovisual integration on acoustic communication in hearing impaired adults"
Since 2010 the hearing industry’s largest manufacturers have collaborated to sponsor a non-competitive, mutually agreed upon research agenda benefiting the hearing aid industry, its customers, and end users. The framework for this collaboration is the Hearing Industry Research Consortium (IRC).
This year's Request for Proposal (RfP) is entitled "The impact of audiovisual integration on acoustic communication in hearing impaired adults". Hearing IRC wishes to support pre-competitive research that advances understanding of the effects of both hearing aid processing and individual audiovisual integration abilities on hearing aid benefit in real-life speech communication. For many years, research on the effects of hearing-aid use has mainly considered factors related to auditory perception. Real-life communication, however, does not occur solely in the auditory domain, but instead triggers simultaneous activation of different modalities, requiring cross-modal integration.
Applications are available on the IRC web site. The deadline for proposals is August 18th, 2017, and decisions will be announced by December 31, 2017.