Improvement in auditory perception is a major objective of therapeutic interventions for the hearing-impaired. Numerous materials are proposed to support these interventions and assess their benefits. Optimally, these materials should explore complex abilities such as those encountered by hearing impaired persons in daily life. Hence, many contemporary assessment and rehabilitation materials are designed on sentence recognition against a speech spectrum noise coming from one or a few sources. While sentences appear as a realistic daily stimulus, one can argue that a speech spectrum noise issued from fixed positions with variable or arbitrarily predetermined signal to noise ratios can be far from what is experienced in real life. Yet, it is possible to create more realistic environments. The Immersion 360 system proposes a virtual environment that can reproduce any everyday sound experience and thus, offer a more realistic condition to assess and rehabilitate auditory perception. The presentation will present the system and some clinical and research applications of this ecological approach.

Learning Objectives:

• Explore why a virtual-immersive modality should be considered in contemporary health care services for hearing-impaired persons.
• Explore how this approach can be implemented in audiology clinics.
• Discuss a few examples of such an implementation.