Abstract
An increasing number of people have great difficulties in understanding speech in noisy environments. These difficulties can be resolved with a directional microphone array which attenuates the background noise while it transmits the desired signals unaltered to the hearing aid. A highly directional endfire array has been developed containing only four omnidirectional microphones which are integrated into the arm of a pair of spectacles. Two endfire arrays, one per ear, devise a binaural hearing aid which further increases the speech intelligibility and also enables localization. The arrays realize maximum directivity with a least-squares optimization of the array processing which also takes into account the diffraction effects due to the presence of the head. The microphone signals are processed with FIR filters to obtain maximum control over both the amplitude and phase of the transfer functions of the filters, thereby achieving maximum directivity. The microphone array attenuates the background noise of a diffuse sound field from 5 dB at 500 Hz to 10 dB at 4 kHz. The improvement in speech reception threshold (SRT) of 16 normal hearing and 26 hearing-impaired subjects will be measured and presented in this paper.
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