EASY LISTENING: Optimizing the consequences of effortful listening in occupational settings

Disturbing noise is the most frequent workplace complaint. Noise and high levels of listening difficulty and effort lead to stress and fatigue, which are further linked with mental health problems, productivity loss, increased sick leave and early retirement (annual burden 476-580 billion Euros in Europe).

In demanding or noisy work situations, or for people with impaired hearing, high effort may be needed to maintain performance. This can have adverse consequences such as stress and fatigue. However, applying effort to listening leads to positive consequences as well (good work performance, pleasure, safety, societal participation). In EASILY, our stance is to optimize the ratio between the costs and benefits of effortful listening (listening value) in order to understand and reduce its socioeconomic burden.

As we lack tools to measure listening value, EASYLI will train 6 research fellows to develop and apply an innovative, interdisciplinary toolbox of ambulatory and laboratory measures of listening effort and listening value. They will gain inter-sectoral knowledge, apply real-time acoustic scene analysis, virtual acoustics, and physiological and subjective measures in laboratory and real-life occupational conditions. With this approach, EASYLI aims to detect fatigue early, and examine how individualized interventions (e.g. machine learning-based speech enhancement algorithms, hearing aids) optimize listening value.

EASYLI consists of 5 academic partners and 4 non-academic partners representing hearing-aid and communication systems industries, audiology, and occupational sectors with challenging acoustic environments. The EASYLI doctorate programme will train a new generation of leading entrepreneurial scientists, and will stimulate employment by developing tools that allow early identification and prevention of listening related fatigue and stress.