Hearing aid devices for smart cities: A survey

Hearing loss population has increased in recent years. Hearing aid technology has evolved in the last decade but the percentage of users of such devices remains very low. With the advent of wireless communication protocols such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), along with the exponential growth of smart phone demand, it is expected an increment of the users of hearing aid devices due to the new use cases that BLE will create. In this contribution, we provide a survey of the existing technologies for hearing aid and their use cases. Because one of the key objectives of smart cities is the quality of life of their citizens, we explain how several hearing aid use cases can be applied in these scenarios.