Implementation of a Digital Hearing Aid with User-Settable Frequency Response and Sliding-Band Dynamic Range Compression as a Smartphone App

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• 关键词：Dynamic range compression ; Hearing aid ; Interactive settings ; Sensorineural hearing loss ; Smartphone app
• 刊名：Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：10127
• 期：1
• 页码：173-186
• 丛书名：Intelligent Human Computer Interaction
• ISBN：978-3-319-52503-7
• 卷排序：10127

文摘

Persons with sensorineural hearing loss suffer from degraded speech perception caused by frequency-dependent elevation of hearing thresholds, reduced dynamic range and abnormal loudness growth, and increased temporal and spectral masking. For improving speech perception by persons with moderate loss of this type, a digital hearing aid is implemented as an Android-based smartphone app. It uses sliding-band dynamic range compression for restoring normal loudness of low-level sounds without making the high-level sounds uncomfortably loud and for reducing the perceptible temporal and spectral distortions associated with currently used single and multiband compression techniques. The processing involves application of a frequency dependent gain function calculated on the basis of critical bandwidth based short-time power spectrum and is realized using FFT-based analysis-synthesis. The implementation has a touch-controlled graphical user interface enabling the app user to fine tune the frequency-dependent parameters in an interactive and real-time mode.