asEars: Designing and Evaluating the User Experience of Wearable Assistive Devices for Single-Sided Deafness
Abstract
Single-sided deafness (SSD) significantly restricts social participation in hearing/speaking cultures due to the person’s difficulty hearing conversations on their deaf side. Although hearing aids for SSD are effective in social situations, the acceptance rate remains low at 4%. To address this problem, we designed and developed a bone conduction-based device to be worn with eyeglasses, involving 53 individuals with SSD including two authors. We conducted a four-week diary study comparing our proposed device with traditional Contralateral Routing of Signals (CROS) hearing aids and explored the factors that might affect the acceptance rate of assistive devices for SSD. The findings indicated that our design was more acceptable for users with SSD due to its effectiveness, social acceptability, and the ability for wearers to use other devices simultaneously, such as earbuds. Based on our results, we discuss implications for designing wearable assistive devices to promote greater acceptance among the target population.
BibTeX
@conference{Takaki-2023-135936,author = {Ken Takaki and Etsushi Nozaki and Tomomi Kanai and Ari Hautasaari and Akinori Kashio and Daisuke Sato and Teru Kamogashira and Tsukasa Uranaka and Shinji Urata and Hajime Koyama and Tatsuya Yamasoba and Yoshihiro Kawahara},
title = {asEars: Designing and Evaluating the User Experience of Wearable Assistive Devices for Single-Sided Deafness},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
year = {2023},
month = {April},
pages = {17},
publisher = {ACM},
keywords = {social acceptance, single-sided deafness, user experience, bone conduction, hearing aids, assistive technology, self-stigma},
}