The Department of Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences of Eindhoven University of Technology has a PhD position vacancy on interaction design for hearing aid personalization in the Human Technology Interaction (HTI) group. The project is funded by the
ROBUST program, and part of the
FEPLab.
The current project will focus on the human technology interaction component of hearing aid personalization. Firstly, the tuning process should be as unobtrusive as possible to the HA wearer, since the tuning process should not interfere with daily tasks, such as ongoing conversations. Secondly, the tuning process should be covert in the sense that it should not be noticeable by conversation partners and other bystanders. Finally, there are privacy, security and ethical issues relating to in-situ recording of acoustic data. We wish to avoid storing recorded data for offline training.
The main research challenges are to identify ethical, practical, and social issues of in-situ hearing device tuning and translating these issues to an appropriate interaction protocol. To formulate the interaction protocol, we need to understand why users choose personalized algorithms, and under which circumstances personalization might not be desirable. Based on earlier research on persuasive technology, acceptance of technology, satisfaction and usability, the current research will identify ethical, practical and social issues of in-situ hearing device tuning and translate these issues to an appropriate interaction protocol. Different from earlier research on these topics, for understanding acceptance of a hearing device, it is crucial to investigate determinants of more covert acceptance. That is, preferably, users remain unaware of many characteristics of this technology. For example, users preferably remain only peripherally aware of many interface elements, and even when interaction with the hearing aid is necessary (e.g., for requesting personalization), that interaction remains as covert as possible (to the user and her/his surroundings). Thereby, this research opens new domains of research into technology acceptance, satisfaction with, and usability of more covert technologies.
You will conduct your research under the supervision of dr. Jaap Ham (TU/e) and
Prof. dr. Bert de Vries (TU/e, EE). You will be a member of the Human-Technology Interaction group and the FEPLab group at TU/e.