HINT-VR: A Child-Appropriate Application for the Self-Assessment of Spatial Hearing Abilities in VR

At approximately five years of age, children already demonstrate the ability to use spatial hearing, an essential skill to achieve spatial release from masking, and, consequently, improved speech intelligibility in acoustically challenging situations. However, hearing loss and auditory processing disorders are prevalent in the young population. They are the most common causes of speech perception difficulties, particularly in noisy or reverberant environments such as classrooms, hampering academic progress and normal development if untreated. The Hearing in Noise Test (HINT) is a widely used, clinically approved measure to assess an individual’s spatial hearing abilities, facilitating timely diagnosis and treatment. Nevertheless, with the shortage of trained healthcare professionals, infrastructure, and resource limitations, these hearing health services are still unavailable to an important part of the world’s population. To address this concern, we present HINT-VR, a child-appropriate application for the self-assessment of spatial hearing abilities in VR. With a promising future in hearing healthcare, VR technologies are a cost-efficient alternative with great potential to assist tele-audiology, facilitating access to underserved communities and improving diagnosis and intervention services to audiological patients. The HINT-VR is a Unity-based open-source software that runs on commercially available head-mounted displays, enabling self-home testing of spatial hearing abilities.