Traditional analog hearing aids are similar to a simple radio. They can be tuned and adjusted for volume, bass and treble. But hearing loss is not just a technical loss of volume. Rather, hearing deficiency can increase sensitivity and reduce tolerance to certain sounds while diminishing sensitivity to others. For instance, digital technology can tell the difference between speech and background noise, allowing one in while filtering out the other.
Approximately 10% of the world’s population suffers from some type of hearing loss, yet only a small percentage of this statistic use a hearing aid. The stigma associated with wearing a hearing aid, customer dissatisfaction with hearing aid performance, and the cost associated with a high performance solution are all causes of low market penetration.
Through the use of digital signal processing, digital hearing aid now offers what the analog hearing aid cannot offer. It proposes the possibility of performing signal-to noise enhancement, flexible gain-processing, digital feedback reduction, etc.
In this paper, the simulation of simple digital hearing aid was developed using MATLAB programming language. The implementation of this configurable digital hearing aid (DHA) system includes the noise reduction filter, frequency shaper function, and amplitude compression function. This digital hearing aid system is design to adapt for mild and moderate hearing loss patient since different gain can be set to map different levels of hearing loss.
Source: IJCIS
Authors: Othman O. Khalifa | M. H. Makhtar | M. S. Baharom
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