Improved BTE hearing-aid directivity using a directional microphone array
Douglas L. Jones, Michael E. Lockwood, Charissa R. Lansing, Albert S. Feng · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2004
Extraction of speech in noise is of great importance to hearing-impaired listeners. Directional microphones are incorporated in some hearing aids to improve noise rejection through increased directivity. A symmetric cardioid response is created either with a single directional microphone, or using beamforming with two omnidirectional microphones. The head-related transfer function (HRTF), however, introduces an asymmetry that cannot be exploited by a linear array of omnidirectional microphones. A new BTE array consisting of a gradient directional microphone with nulls in the front–back vertical plane and two omnidirectional microphones exploits the asymmetry of the HRTF to obtain almost 2 dB better directivity than the best cardioid. HRTFs measured on KEMAR with this array were transformed to the frequency domain, where directivity-maximizing coefficients in each band were derived. The Articulation-Index (AI) weighted directivity gain of this optimal three-element directional array was 6.4 dB greater than a single omnidirectional microphone on the BTE, whereas the directivity gain of the HRTF-optimized two-omni beamformer was 4.6 dB, and the optimal free-field cardioid placed on the head yielded 4.4 dB. [Work partially supported by NIH (NIDCD) under Grant No. 1 R01 DC005762-01A1.]