Semi-Automatic Manufacturing of Customized Hearing Aids Using a Feature Driven Rule-based Framework

We present a semi-automatic solution to the problem of customized 3-D shape modeling using a rule based system. The solution is illustrated with the use case of hearing aid manufacturing. The current process of manufacturing customized hearing aids consists of many manual steps, all of which require expert knowledge. The idea is to translate this expert knowledge into machine readable rules using a procedural knowledge representation. Together with a set of anatomical features detected on the ear impression, the necessary surface shaping operations are defined and applied. The advantage of this approach is its high flexibility and customisability. It yields better consistency, efficiency and reproducibility of the resulting device. We validate the approach in a real production environment.