The A2I team met on August 20-21, 2024 on the premises of the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel for a final meeting, as the joint project is now coming to an end after 3.5 years. At the meeting, the results of the various work streams (audiology, cardiology, occupational medicine and the empirical work on acceptance factors for radical innovations) were presented and discussed. The partners agreed that the project - despite all the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic - has achieved exciting research results and also generated many ideas for future research for the research institutions involved. However, the work is not yet complete and several scientific publications on the project’s research results are expected in the coming months.

The first results of the A2I project in the field of auditory attention decoding were presented by Lisa Straetmans-Oehme (University of Oldenburg) at the Mobile Brain Imaging Conference (MoBI 2024) in Piran (Slovenia). The poster entitled “Towards neural speech tracking and auditory attention decoding in everyday life” was received with great interest by the conference participants.

As part of the project, a new research paper entitled “Exploring the Role of Professional Identity in the Implementation of Clinical Decision Support Systems-A Narrative Review ” was recently published in the journal Implementation Science. The study provides an in-depth look at the complex interplay between clinical decision support systems (CDSS) and the professional identity of healthcare professionals.

Through a systematic literature review covering studies from 2010 to 2023, critical insights were gained into how CDSS can be perceived by healthcare professionals as either a threat or a tool to enhance their own professional role.

Key findings of the study include:

• The perception of CDSS as a threat to professional identity has a significant impact on the success of their implementation, particularly in relation to perceptions of professional control, autonomy and relationships with patients.
• Factors such as technology integration, organizational dynamics, and individual attitudes toward CDSS play a critical role in shaping these perceptions.
• Health professionals’ reactions to CDSS vary from perceived threats to their expertise and autonomy to opportunities to expand their role within clinical workflows.

The authors emphasize the need to consider the impact on professional identity at all stages of CDSS implementation. It is considered crucial that health managers recognize and address potential threats to professional identity in order to promote a more inclusive and effective integration of CDSS into health practice. Furthermore, a participatory approach to the design and implementation of CDSS is advocated, emphasizing the direct involvement of health professionals to mitigate threat perceptions and increase uptake of the system.

The study is freely available (open access).

Part of the nature of research is that the unexpected happens and the course of a research project is never completely predictable. Nevertheless, the COVID pandemic was unexpected for all partners. Due to the restrictions on visits, the studies planned in the project could only be carried out with a considerable delay, which also had the effect of delaying further work based on the project. The A2I partners are therefore delighted that our funding organisation, the BMBF, has approved a 6-month extension to the project. This will allow us to finalise the planned research work.

On 26 and 27 February 2024, the A2I partners met at the OFFIS Institute for Information Technology in Oldenburg to discuss the status of the work and plan the coming months. Project partner Iconstorm, which has now completed its work and will leave the project at the end of February, gave a final presentation on the results achieved. The ongoing evaluation studies and their analyses were discussed in detail and the publication plans were updated.

Kiel University is pleased to announce the publication of the research paper on innovation acceptance of frontline employees entitled “Employee acceptance of disruptive service innovations at the frontline: The role of collective sensemaking processes”. The study by Christopher Garrelfs, Carsten Schultz and Marie Lüngen was conducted as part of the associated BMBF project Audio-PSS. The study is based on the example of hearing acoustics. It analyses the effects of the degree of innovation and competitive threats from other market participants on the acceptance of radical service innovations among service employees. Incremental innovations, such as digital hearing aid support, were compared with radical innovations, such as AI-based hearing aid fitting. The results show that service employees have a preference for incremental innovations and that competitive threats do not cause any significant differences in innovation acceptance. The exchange of information within the working group and the entrepreneurial orientation of the organisation play a moderating role. The findings of the study contribute to a better understanding of the acceptance of service innovations and offer valuable implications for practice and research.

The study is freely available (Open Access) and can be found at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/caim.12563.

Kiel University recently presented initial findings from an ongoing sub-project at the 30th Innovation and Product Development Management Conference (IPDMC) in Lecco, Italy. As part of this project, the results of a study investigating the acceptance of radical service innovations among hearing care professionals were presented. The results of the study show that acceptance of radical service innovations, such as AI-powered hearing aids, is moderate and that internal communication does indeed play a decisive role in employee acceptance. However, the study also showed that it is not enough to emphasise only the positive aspects of a service through targeted communication. Instead, it is important to initiate an honest and transparent discussion about the advantages and disadvantages within the company. Further exciting results from the study are expected this year.

The A2I Consortium will present their findings from a workshop with CI patients at the annual meeting of the German Society of Audiology. In their presentation: Patients’ voice as part of participative development within research, the speakers will discuss one of the central research questions of A2I: The acceptance of AI-based systems in healthcare, more specifically the design of human-machine interaction and the transparency of decision-making, which is highly relevant for the user.

Together with 11 CI patients, our team developed different patient journeys, derived from the personal experiences of the participants. Through brainwriting methods and card sorting, new insights were gained and existing theses could be reviewed as well as their individual aspects were hierarchized.

The workshop participants showed a broad knowledge of technology and audiological issues and sensitized the consortium to the psychosocial aspects associated with CI care.

On 3 and 4 November 2022, the A2I project partners met at Hörzentrum Oldenburg to discuss the status of the project and agree on the next steps for the coming months. This time, the main topics were the app development and the planning of the evaluation studies of the project.

Incidentally, the photo above does not show the demonstrator developed by the project. The partners are confident that they will be able to realise a smaller form factor.

After many months in which the meetings of the partners could only take place online, a hybrid project meeting was held for the first time on 29 April 2022 at the Advanced Bionics premises in Hanover. Some participants were on site and others were connected online. The status of the recording studies as well as the plans for the demonstrators and studies in the use cases audiology, cardiology and occupational medicine were discussed.

In the just published brochure “BMBF Project Gallery 2021”, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research presents interesting research projects in the field of interactive technologies for health and quality of life that have been newly launched in 2021, starting with the A2I project on page 2.

The brochure (in German language) is available online at https://www.interaktive-technologien.de/service/publikationen/projektgalerie-2021.

Our team has created a short video with a presentation of the project A2I and the current state of the work for the Project Gallery 2021 of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The video is now online on Youtube.

The first of our data collection campaigns started in Oldenburg a few weeks ago. In measurement sessions of four hours each, subjects go through several conditions of different audiological complexity and movement requirements. Meanwhile, physiological data such as electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiography (ECG) as well as behavioural data regarding attention and listening fatigue are recorded. The multimodal data that is collected during this study will later be used to train the AI algorithms.

On March 23, 2021, the kick-off meeting of the BMBF funding line ‘Adaptive Technologies for Society – Intelligent Interaction of Humans and AI (MeKI)’ took place under the leadership of the project management organization VDI/VDE-IT.

All nine projects of the funding line introduced themselves to each other, with the A2I project being presented by project coordinator Prof. Dr.-Ing. Andreas Hein. Subsequently, the topics “cross-partner information exchange”, “evaluation and user integration under current conditions” and “current regulations for artificial intelligence” were discussed in three parallel workshops.

An overview of all projects in the MeKI funding line can be found at https://www.interaktive-technologien.de/foerderung/bekanntmachungen/meki.

Download: A2I presentation (german, PDF, 1 MB)

On March 18th and 19th 2021, the kick-off meeting of the “Augmented Auditive Intelligence” (A2I) project took place during the COVID-19 lockdown and thus “under special circumstances”, with participation of all project partners.

In addition to getting to know the project partners, their special competences and interests, the focus of the meeting was on the organization of communication and cooperation in the project and on the detailed planning of all work packages for the first project months. Topics, in particular, were the technical-functional state of the art and requirements analysis pending at the beginning of the project, the planning of a multi-sensor data acquisition study to create a database for the development of mechanical learning techniques, data quality and time synchronization, but also a discussion the concrete use cases that the project will address.