E4 assessment of physiological measures (Kondaurova et al., 2024)
Creators: name: Kondaurova, Maria V.
name: Smith, Alan
name: Mishra, Ruchik
name: Zheng, Qi
name: Kondaurova, Irina
name: Francis, Alexander L.
name: Sallee, Emily
Publisher: name: ASHA journals
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 420102
subject: Audiology
classificationCode: 470102
subject: Communication technology and digital media studies

description: <b>Purpose:</b> Telepractice is a growing service model that delivers aural rehabilitation to deaf and hard-of hearing children via telecommunications technology. Despite known benefits of telepractice, this delivery approach may increase patients’ listening effort (LE) characterized as an allocation of cognitive resources toward an auditory task. The study tested techniques for collecting physiological measures of LE in normal-hearing (NH) children during remote (referred to as tele-) and in-person communication using the wearable Empatica E4 wristband.<b>Method: </b>Participants were 10 children (age range: 9–12 years old) who came to two tele- and two in-person weekly sessions, order counterbalanced. During each session, the children heard a short passage read by the clinical provider, completed an auditory passage comprehension task, and self-rated their effort as a part of the larger study. Measures of electrodermal activity and blood volume pulse amplitude were collected from the child E4 wristband.<b>Results:</b> No differences in child subjective, physiological measures of LE or passage comprehension scores were found between in-person sessions and telesessions. However, an effect of treatment duration on subjective and physiological measures of LE was identified. Children self-reported a significant increase in LE over time. However, their physiological measures demonstrated a trend indicating a decrease in LE. A significant association between subjective measures and the passage comprehension task was found suggesting that those children who reported more effort demonstrated a higher proportion of correct responses.<b>Conclusions:</b> The study demonstrated the feasibility of collection of physiological measures of LE in NH children during remote and in-person communication using the E4 wristband. The results suggest that measures of LE are multidimensional and may reflect different sources of, or cognitive responses to, increased listening demand.<b>Supplemental Material S1. </b>Five-grade scale with emoticons.<b>Supplemental Material S2. </b>Standard scores and percentile ranks for each child.<b>Supplemental Material S3. </b>A sample recording of (a) the raw and detrended EDA (electrodermal activity) signal and (b) the raw BVPA (blood volume pulse amplitude) signal.<b>Supplemental Material S4. </b>Fitted linear mixed effect model for EDA (elecrodermal activity).<b>Supplemental Material S5</b><b>.</b> The multinomial logistic regression with mixed effects model for child self-reports.<b>Supplemental Material S6. </b>Fitted linear mixed effect model for BVPA (blood volume pulse amplitude).<b>Supplemental Material S7. </b>Fitted linear mixed effect model for the proportion of correct responses.<b>Supplemental Material S8. </b>Relationships between (a) self-reported and physiological (EDA, BVPA) measures of LE; self-reported measures of LE and the proportion of correct responses and (b) the proportion of correct responses and physiological (EDA, BVPA) measures of LE.Kondaurova, M. V., Smith, A., Mishra, R., Zheng, Q., Kondaurova, I., Francis, A. L., Sallee, E. (2024). Empatica E4 assessment of child physiological measures of listening effort during remote and in-person communication. <i>American Journal of Audiology, 33</i>(4), 1331–1340. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_AJA-24-00078