Benefits of a smartphone as a remote microphone system
Stephanie Tittle, Linda M. Thibodeau, Issa M. S. Panahi, Preethi Codanda Chengappa · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2019
Remote microphone (RM) systems have been shown to reduce the challenges hearing aid users face with communicating in noisy environments. The RMs worn by the speaker stream their voice wirelessly to the users’ hearing aids which results in a significant improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio. Given that the additional cost of a RM may not be feasible for some individuals, the possible use of applications on a smartphone has been explored. The Apple iPhone has an application called ‘Live Listen’ (LL) that can be used as an RM with made for iPhone hearing aids. The Statistical Signal Processing Research Laboratory at The University of Texas at Dallas has developed an open-source smartphone application for the iPhone that is also designed to be used as an RM. The purpose of this study was to compare the benefit of LL and the open-source app for participants with and without hearing loss on sentence recognition tasks in noise when listening through Starkey Halo2 hearing aids connected to an iPhone 7. Similar improvements in speech recognition were noted for both LL and the open-source app.