Interference reduction for the hearing impaired
Patrick M. Zurek · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1991
Despite continuing technical improvements to hearing aids, user dissatisfaction with the benefit provided remains high. The most frequent source of complaint concerns the interfering effect of environmental background noise on speech reception. This paper will review the factors thought to be responsible for this increased susceptibility to interference as well as approaches that are being taken to improve noisy speech reception through hearing aids. Two of the factors that often contribute to poor speech reception are decreased audibility of speech sounds and loss of binaurality. Techniques that have shown promise for reducing interference include adapting the frequency response of single-microphone hearing aids to minimize spread of masking, and fixed and adaptive beamforming using microphone arrays. A summary will be given of the benefits provided by these techniques and their dependencies on acoustic conditions. [Work supported by NIH.]