Karolina Smeds has an MSc in Engineering Physics from KTH, Stockholm, Sweden, and an MSc in Audiology from the University of Southampton, Great Britain. She has been working as an engineer at the Manilla School for deaf children in Stockholm and has been lecturing at the Audiology program at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. At the audiology program she has been responsible for technically oriented courses such as physics, signals and systems, psychoacoustics, hearing aid technology and hearing aid fitting.
Karolina Smeds carried out her PhD work at KTH under the supervision of professor Arne Leijon and in 2004 she got her PhD with the thesis, “Less is more? Loudness aspects of prescriptive methods for nonlinear hearing aids”. Prescriptive methods were evaluated for hearing-impaired people with mild to moderate hearing loss. The main result was that generic prescriptive methods available today generally prescribe higher gain than members of this group of hearing-aid wearers prefer. A summary of the thesis can be found here.
In 2006, when Widex decided to establish the new ORCA Europe research group, Karolina Smeds was asked to be the director.
