Binaural Hearing Aids with Wireless Microphone Systems including Speaker Localization and Spatialization

The digital wireless microphone systems for hearing aids have been developed to provide a clean and intelligible speech signal to hearing-impaired listeners for e.g. school or teleconference applications. In this technology, the voice of the speaker is picked up by a body-worn microphone, wirelessly transmitted to the hearing aids and rendered in a diotic way (same signal at both ears), preventing any speaker localization clues from being provided. The reported algorithm performs a real-time binaural localization and tracking of the talker so that the clean speech signal can then be spatialized, according to its estimated position relative to the aided listener. This feature is supposed to increase comfort, sense of immersion and intelligibility for the users of such wireless microphone systems.