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 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.