Integration of signal processing modules of hearing aids as real-time smartphone apps

Abstract

Our research group has been working on developing an open source research platform for hearing improvement studies based on smartphones noting that currently no open source, programmable, and mobile research platform exists in the public domain for carrying out hearing improvement studies. Such a platform allows smartphones, which are already widely possessed and carried by people, to be used for the development and field testing of existing or new hearing improvement signal processing algorithms. A number of smartphones apps have already been developed by our research group for specific or individual modules of the speech processing pipeline of a typical digital hearing aid. This work covers the integration of several individual signal processing modules into an integrated smartphone app. The steps taken in order to enable the individual modules to run together in real-time and with low audio latency will be presented and a demo of the integrated app running on both iOS and Android smartphones will be shown.