Implementation of Digital Hearing Aid as a Smartphone Application
Saketh Sharma, Nitya Tiwari and Prem C. Pandey
Abstract:
Hearing aids for persons with sensorineural hearing loss aim to compensate for degraded speech perception caused by frequency-dependent elevation of hearing thresholds, reduced dynamic range, abnormal loudness growth and increased temporal and spectral masking. A digital hearing aid is implemented as a smartphone application as an alternative to ASIC-based hearing aids. The implementation provides user-configurable processing for background noise suppression and dynamic range compression. Speech enhancement technique using spectral subtraction based on geometric approach and noise spectrum estimation based on dynamic quantile tracking is implemented to improve speech perception. To compensate for reduced dynamic range and frequency-dependent elevation of hearing thresholds, a sliding-band dynamic range compression technique is used. Both processing blocks are implemented for real-time processing using single FFT-based analysis-synthesis. Implementation as a smartphone application has been carried out using Nexus 5X with Android 7.1 Nougat OS. A touch-controlled graphical user interface enables the user to fine tune the processing parameters in an interactive and real-time mode. The audio latency is 45 ms, making it suitable for face-to-face communication.
Cite as: Sharma, S., Tiwari, N., Pandey, P.C. (2018) Implementation of Digital Hearing Aid as a Smartphone Application. Proc. Interspeech 2018, 1175-1179, DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2018-2031.
BiBTeX Entry:
@inproceedings{Sharma2018,
author={Saketh Sharma and Nitya Tiwari and Prem C. Pandey},
title={Implementation of Digital Hearing Aid as a Smartphone Application},
year=2018,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2018},
pages={1175--1179},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2018-2031},
url={http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2018-2031} }