A hearing model to estimate mandarin speech intelligibility for the hearing impaired patients

A hearing model, which is parameterized by hearing thresholds, degrees of loudness recruitment and reductions of frequency resolution of a hearing-impaired (HI) patient, is proposed in this paper. The model is developed in the filter-bank framework and is flexible for fitting hearing-loss conditions of HI patients. Psychoacoustic experiments were conducted under clean and noisy conditions to validate the model´s capability in predicting Mandarin speech intelligibility for HI patients. Statistical analysis on the hearing-test results suggests that the proposed model can predict Mandarin speech intelligibility for HI patients to a certain degree.