I mentioned in my previous post that Rodney Perkins' startup motto Make it Happen inspired me to pursue my long-time vision for a translational research center for the hearing aid industry. I recently found the business plan that I wrote for such a center and sent to all the major hearing aid companies in early 2004, which led to the creation of the Starkey Hearing Research Center in Berkeley, California in late 2004. I had forgotten that my pitch was to create the US equivalent of the Eriksholm Research Center, except that the research would support the commercial business of the owner company.
I chose to locate the center in Berkeley for the opportunity to work with UC Berkeley professors Erv Hafter and the late David Wessel, the former because of his spatial hearing focus and engaging scientific mind, the latter because of his creative approach to audio processing for music. This proved valuable as work with Erv led to our seminal research (Sarampalis et al, 2009) showing that hearing aid technology can reduce listening effort, while our collaboration with David led to the self-fitting tool SoundPoint.
I hired the first two researchers for the center before it opened in December 2004: Sridhar Kalluri out of the University of Maryland and Deniz Başkent out of the House Ear Institute--both incredibly talented individuals who I knew had the potential to make an impact quickly in our research (and I wasn't wrong). We spent the first month working in a sparse multi-desk postdoc room across the hall from Erv Hafter's office on the UC Berkeley campus while we waited for renovations on our center to be completed.
I spent several days that month in Erv's office debating how we might test whether hearing aids reduced cognitive load--what material should we use (words, nonsense sentences, meaningful sentences) what paradigm should we use (reaction time, dual attention task, pupillometry). Ultimately, Erv and I ended up writing a grant to fund the hiring of Tassos Sarampolis to lead this project. Tassos created a car driving simulation for the first experiment to test the effect of hearing performance on driving accuracy. When that didn't work out, we settled on the more traditional cognitive load measures of reaction time and dual attention tasks. Ultimately, we ended up proving that signal processing similar to both hearing aid noise reduction and directional microphones reduced listening effort, a major breakthrough in understanding hearing aid benefit.
