Microphone-Array Hearing Aids

Microphone-array hearing aids provide a promising solution to the problems encountered by hearing-impaired persons when listening to speech in the presence of background noise. This chapter first discusses implementation issues and performance metrics specific to the hearing-aid application. A review of previous work on microphone-array hearing aids includes systems with directional microphones, fixed beamformers, adaptive beamformers, physiologically-motivated processing, and binaural outputs. Recent simulation results of one promising adaptive beamforming system are presented. The performance of microphone-array hearing aids depends heavily on the acoustic environments in which they are used. Additional information about the level of reverberation, number of interferers, and relative levels of interferers encountered by hearing-aid users in everyday situations is required to quantify the benefit of microphone-array hearing aids and to select the optimal processing strategy.

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