User Involvement in Design and Application of Virtual Reality Gamification to Facilitate the Use of Hearing Aids

The 3D Tune-In project aims to create an innovative toolkit based on 3D sound, visuals and gamification techniques to facilitate different target audiences in understanding and using the varied settings of their hearing aid to attain optimum performance in different social contexts. In the early stages of project development, hearing aid (HA) users participated in activities to identify user requirements regarding the difficulties and issues they face in everyday situations due to their hearing loss. The findings from questionnaire and interview studies and identification of current personas and scenarios of use indicate that the project can clearly and distinctly support the requirements of people with hearing loss as well as improve the general public's understanding of hearing loss. Five Future Scenarios of use have been derived to describe how the technologies and games to be developed by the 3D Tune-In project will address these requirements.