VR combined with unobtrusive heart rate monitoring is an effective method for evaluating hearing aids in naturalistic conditions. This approach allows for head movements and changes to body orientation, which are necessary for assessing hearing aid features that steer by motion detection. Relative heart rate was sensitive to both task difficulty and hearing aid technology, aligning with changes in pupil dilation and suggesting that motion-steering of hearing aid noise management can benefit speech comprehension following a localization task by reducing listening stress and effort.
Christensen et al. (Tue,) studied this question.