Abstract
The occlusion effect is a common complaint from users of hearing aids with narrow or unvented earmolds. This phenomenon makes the user hear his own voice muffled. In the scientific literature, fixed and adaptive controllers have been proposed for occlusion effect reduction. This work proposes a cepstral method to estimate the stable optimal solution for feedforward occlusion cancellation and a fixed controller that utilizes this estimate to reduce the occlusion effect in hearing aids. The cepstral method operates on a feedback structure at a calibration process. Simulations have shown that the performance of the cepstral method improves as the length of the signal uttered by the hearing aid user increases, resulting in estimates with average normalized misalignment less than -19 and -34 dB for signals lasting 1.5 and 5 s. The estimates are significantly more accurate below 500 Hz, which is the frequency range common to the occlusion effect. In addition, results have pointed out that the controller attenuated the occlusion effect, averagely decreasing by 0.17 dB the distortion power and increasing by 0.13 the objective perceptual quality MOS-LQO score.
Highlights
A CCORDING to the World Health Organization, in 2019, around 466 million people, more than 5% of the world population, have disabling hearing loss [2]
The goal of this work is twofold: first and foremost, without assuming to know the acoustic path, to propose a cepstral method for estimating the stable optimal solution of the feedforward occlusion cancellation; second, to propose a controller designed based on this estimate and without assuming to know the forward path for attenuating the occlusion effect in the feedforward cancellation structure
Comparing with none controller, the solution of [12] raised the mean P and mean opinion score (MOS)-LQO by 4.49 dB and 0.13, respectively. These results suggest that, on average, this solution perceptually reduces the occlusion effect despite significantly distorting the sound heard by the hearing aid user
Summary
A CCORDING to the World Health Organization, in 2019, around 466 million people, more than 5% of the world population, have disabling hearing loss [2]. According to the last census conducted in Brazil, in 2010, 9.7 million Brazilian citizens, or 5.1% of the national population, had some type of hearing impairment [3]. Hearing impairment can lead to social isolation, professional difficulties and risk to personal security, resulting in a reduction in the quality of life and productivity of the citizen. There are three types of hearing loss: conductive, sensorineural and mixed [4]. Compensation depends on the type and degree of the hearing loss and can be performed mainly with hearing aids, cochlear implants or surgery
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