Adaptive beamforming for moving array with 3-axis electronic compass in hearing aids

People who use digital hearing aids with directional microphones want to listen target sounds selectively, whether the speaker is remote or nearby. We have proposed a steerable microphone array technique that combines omnidirectional and directional microphone signals with 3-axis electronic compass. When the user moves the array toward a desired sound source, the microphone array can be steered while fast and slow head movements. The 3-axis electronic compass can be built in hearing aids to generate coordinates of a microphone in array. When array moves, the adaptive beamformer uses the geometry information to find optimal solution for enhancing the sound quality such as speech intelligibility.