Abstract

Speech intelligibility is most often corrupted by a noisy environment, which profoundly affects the hearing impaired. Hearing impairment ranks first in the United States among chronic disabilities. As communicative disorders go hand-in-hand with hearing impairment, there is an impetus to enhance speech intelligibility. Electronics miniaturization, along with digital signal processing techniques, has made speech enhancement more viable through digital-based hearing aids.1 Development of digital hearing aids for the hearing impaired has seen exciting growth over the last decade, due to the ongoing miniaturization and increasing power of microprocessor electronics. Digital hearing aids offer many significant advantages over older conventional analog hearing aids, in that they are programmable in nature.2 This flexibility allows for the implementation of various signal processing techniques to enhance the intelligibility of speech or a particular sound source of interest. Computer simulation as a means of development for digital hearing aids facilitates design and is especially suitable for the evaluation of signal processing techniques. When developing working models of the digital hearing aid, the physiological properties of the ear canal and ear drum can be considered as well.3 The three primary operations of the digital hearing aid are amplification, filtering, and output limiting. Most research applied to the digital hearing aid lies within filtering in which two sources of noise have been delineated, 1) noise attributed to feedback and 2) noise attributed to the listening environment. An inherent problem with the structural design of conventional hearing aids is that of acoustic and electronic feedback, due to the microphone-receiver proximity and the acoustical dynamics of the ear canal. Feedback in the hearing aid degrades overall signal-to-noise ratio and thus limits the maximum usable gain of the instrument. Adaptive noise cancellation of feedback implementing LMS has been researched, simulated in depth, and

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