System Design Of Smart Binaural Hearing Aid

As global population keeps aging,almost 400 million of people around the world suffer from hearing loss-related diseases,and about 100 million of them are scattered in China.Hearing loss sets barrier to communication,which may somehow induce other diseases like disability,psychological disorder or Alzheimer’s.Upon current condition,hearing-aid is the best choice,but its use rate and customer satisfaction still stay at a low level.There are many reasons behind it,such as poor user experience in complex acoustic environment,high cost and inconvenience,etc.Existing hearing aid enhances voice effects by the built-in signal processor,but its micro-design restricts chip size and battery capacity.As a result,it’s quite hard to improve user experience.First,in regarding to existing hearing aids design limitations to improving user experience,the author analyzed the system structure and acoustic restoration process that simulates human ear,then proposed a new binaural hearing-aid system which integrates smart mobile terminal with wireless technology.Based on the wireless smart mobile terminal,this system can provide speedy computing and plenty power,which greatly enhances voice effects and speech intelligence when applied into binaural hearing aids.At the same time,it will not bring heavy computing pressure or large power consumption to the hearing aids.Second,with respect to user complaints on its low speech intelligence in complex acoustic environment and expensive price,etc.,the author analyzed the defects of the existing binaural hearing aids’ speech enhancement algorithm,then proposed a new speech enhancement algorithm based on recurrent neural network as well as a loudness compensation strategy based on wide dynamic range compression.Also,the author utilized real-time speech processing and cross-language routine call in the mobile system,which can optimize real-time signal processing,to realize a smartphone-based full-featured hearing aid.At last,in consideration of the system structure of smart binaural hearing aids,the author proposed a low-power hearing-aid system which lessens transmission data amount by compressing speech signal in order to lower down transmission rate and system power consumption.This system reduces the complexity of hardware by simplifying compressed coding scaling ratio and reusing self-adaptive predictor hardware.In the meanwhile,the author built a smart binaural hearing-aid system and tested that it’s effective to enhance voice effect.In the objective test,PESQ increased by over 60%,while SNR and STOI increased by over 15%.In the subjective test,the author also earned high comments.When running real-time speech enhancement algorithm,the application consumes lower than 30% of the smartphone CPU and less than 200 MB memory.All in all,it assists hearing-loss people to hear again and ensures the performance of other smartphone functions at the same time.