Title :
A digital hearing aid with 8-band curvilinear loudness fitting
Author :
Park, Young-Cheol ; Kim, Dong-wook ; Kim, Won-ky ; Park, Sang-il
Author_Institution :
Center of Biomed. Eng., Biomedical Res. Inst., Seoul, South Korea
Abstract :
Owing to technological advances in very large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits, high-speed digital signal processing (DSP) chips become fast enough to allow for real-time implementation of hearing aid algorithms in units small enough to be wearable. In this paper, a body-worn type digital hearing aid (DHA) based on a dedicated DSP chip is developed. A fitting software running on a PC supported by the Win95 OS is also developed. The fitting protocol is based on the NAL-R procedure applied to eight frequency bands, but it is designed to support a curvilinear fitting to cope with the nonlinear perception of hearing-impaired listeners. Preliminary subjective tests regarding the speech intelligibility and perceived quality revealed that the new DHA could be of benefit to hearing aid users
Keywords :
VLSI; application specific integrated circuits; digital signal processing chips; hearing aids; loudness; medical signal processing; real-time systems; speech intelligibility; 16 bit; 8-band curvilinear loudness fitting; NAL-R procedure; VLSI; Windows 95; body-worn type digital hearing aid; dedicated DSP chip; digital hearing aid; fitting protocol; fitting software; hearing aid algorithms; hearing-impaired listeners; nonlinear perception; perceived quality; real-time implementation; speech intelligibility; very large-scale integrated circuits; Auditory system; Curve fitting; DH-HEMTs; Digital signal processing chips; Frequency; Integrated circuit technology; Protocols; Signal processing algorithms; Testing; Very large scale integration;
Conference_Titel :
Consumer Electronics, 1997. ISCE '97., Proceedings of 1997 IEEE International Symposium on
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-4371-9
DOI :
10.1109/ISCE.1997.658346
