The sound of a noisy restaurant during the breakfast rush was the crucial test of new hearing aid technology in a study conducted by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The study showed that the hearing aids worked well in a noisy environment — the most challenging test for a hearing aid. Michael Valente, Ph.D., director of the Division of Adult Audiology in the Department of Otolaryngology at the School of Medicine said, "We have a sound room set up to be an exact duplication of being in a loud restaurant. It's real restaurant noise, and it allows us to realistically test hearing aids," Valente says. "One of the most common complaints I hear from people who wear hearing aids is that they have stopped going to restaurants because they can't communicate. So we are testing hearing aid technology that might better help people hear in noisy places." The study, published in the June issue of the International Journal of Audiology, was the first to use such a setting to test a new hearing aid technology — open-fit hearing aids with directional microphones. "We found that the open-fit hearing aids with directional microphones on average gave wearers a 20 percent improvement in speech intelligibility in the restaurant setting compared to not having a hearing aid or wearing an open-fit aid without a directional microphone," Valente says. "We are the first to show that a directional microphone in open-fit can provide improved performance in noise."