Hearing impairment simulation for the performance evaluation of hearing aid system

With the advent of high speed digital signal processing chips, many digital techniques have been introduced to hearing aids. As new techniques are developed a subject-based test is needed to verify the performance of each new technique, which requires much time and cost. Here, the authors propose an indirect way to evaluate and predict the performance of a hearing aid system without the help of such a subject-based test. The system is developed based on a model constructed from the auditory test results of sensorineural hearing impaired persons. To verify the proposed system, a processed signal was heard by normal persons and their responses were compared with those of a real impaired person. The results showed only a slight difference between them. In addition, 3 kinds of currently available digital hearing aid algorithm were applied to the system and evaluated