Open portable platform for hearing aid research

Abstract

The NIDCD has recently funded a number of projects to develop portable signal processing tools that enable real-time processing of the acoustic environment. The overarching goal is to provide a large group of researchers with the means to efficiently develop and evaluate, in collaborative multi-center environments, novel signal processing schemes, individualized fitting procedures, and technical solutions and services for hearing apparatus such as hearing aids and assistive listening devices. We report on the specific goals and results of two such projects. In one of them (R01DC015429), an open source software platform for real-time runtime environments is developed: The open Master Hearing Aid (openMHA). It provides an extendible set of algorithms for hearing aid signal processing and runs under Linux, Windows, and Mac operating systems on standard PC platforms and on small-scale ARM-based boards. An optimized version of openMHA is provided for the companion SBIR project (R44DC016247), which is a portable, rigid, versatile, and wearable platform featuring an ARM Cortex®-A8 processor. The resulting Portable Hearing Aid Community Platform consists of both hardware elements to provide the advanced desired functionality and software routines to provide for all the features that researchers may need to develop new algorithms.