Selecting reusable test signals for hearing instruments with a combined design and verification flow

The paper proposes a novel design and verification flow for signal processing systems in hearing instruments, with the purpose of assessing the suitability of test signals for re-use in future versions of a system under development. While a traditional design flow maps idealized functional descriptions of the signal processing algorithms to concrete non-ideal hardware, the new flow maps models of the hardware´s typical non-idealities back into the functional description, allowing to study their effect on test signals. The paper uses sample simplified signal processing algorithms for hearing instruments for demonstrating the new modeling approach and uses sample Monte Carlo simulations and sensitivity analysis to show how such models can help determining the suitability of test signals for future variants of the hearing instrument under test.