Reverberation canceling wireless aid for hearing impaired

The stringent requirements on size and power consumption constrain the conventional hearing aid devices. Besides providing an economic and user friendly aid, reverberation/echo cancellation is an important requirement. With the technological advancements, wireless hearing aids exploiting the usage of multi-microphones, mixed signals and RF signals processing circuits, digital signal processing units sound promising to overcome existing constraints. A new wireless hearing aid system is proposed in this paper. Unlike the previously reported wireless hearing aid concept, it needs only one way data transfer from body unit to the earpiece. It helps in minimizing power consumption in the earpiece RF-linked with a body unit with DSP based reverberation canceling scheme. For this purpose, a noise cancellation algorithm is developed based on beam-forming technique. The functioning of the whole system comprising an earpiece and a body unit has been ensured using the Advanced Design SystemTM. The ADS compatible behavioral models were developed in order to enable the system level simulation. A comprehensive noise analysis is carried out and validated.

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