Study of Hearing Aid System Adapted to Direction Inputted by User

Abstract

It is well known that the beam forming method is useful for improving the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of hearing aids. However, the method for hearing aids aims for sounds which come from areas in front of the user. If hearing sounds which come from other directs is desired, the user must change the direction he faces to that of the targeted sound. Thus, we have studied new beam forming methods which make users hear sounds clearly that does not require changes to the direction the user is facing by using a desired direction selector and 4ch microphone array on a pair of glasses. To evaluate we performed three experiments. The results showed that errors using the direction selector were within 13°, if the wave is input directly into the microphone, the direction estimation error with the microphone array mounted on the glasses was within 15°, SNR obtained by our system was more than 5dB. In this paper, we describe our study’s background and purpose in Section 1 and in Sections 2 and 3, we describe the beam forming method for the hearing aid and our proposed method. In Sections 4, 5, and 6, we show the results of three experiments, and finally we provide a conclusion in Section 7.