Configuration of Digital Hearing Aid Easily Handled over Warped Frequency Axis in Fitting Process
Mitsuhiro Ogihara, Kenzo Takahashi, Mikio Mori, Shuji Taniguchi, Shozo Kato, Chikahiro Araki · IEEJ Transactions on Electronics Information and Systems · 2010
Recently, the digital and LSI based miniaturization technologies drastically have changed the hearing aids from the conventional single function of amplification to multiple functions. However, since the conventional hearing aids mostly control the flat gain at the center of a frequency band divided every octave to recover the auditory loss of users, so that the discontinuous gain tends to deteriorate the hearing quality due to the unnatural saw-teeth figured error. This paper proposes a solution of digital hearing aid which can be independently controlled at each audiogram test frequency and provide superb voice quality with less noise due to continuous variable gain characteristics in a wide dynamic range. The simulation results show the outstanding effect of the proposed scheme in the voice quality improvement which potential hearing aid users have considered to be a key to satisfy them.