Objective and Subjective Evaluation of Wind Noise Reduction in Digital Hearing Aids

Objective and Subjective Evaluation of Wind Noise Reduction in Digital Hearing Aids
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 35
Release: 2011
Genre: Audiology
ISBN:

Wind noise is problematic for hearing aid users who enjoy outdoor activities. Not only is it annoying, it can create distortion by overloading the microphone and masking signals that hearing aid users desire to hear. Some hearing aid manufacturers offer wind noise reduction in addition to general noise reduction (WNR + NR) for clinicians to manipulate in their software. This study compares objective and subjective measures of wind noise reduction as well as subjective measure of intelligibility obtained using various hearing aid manufacturers and noise reduction settings while HINT sentences were played in the presence of constantly generated wind. Significant differences in the subjective and objective amount of noise present and perceived speech intelligibility was found both between manufacturers and between noise reduction settings for each manufacturer. Subjectively, intelligibility and noisiness were positively correlated (r=0.74, p>.001); conditions that were perceived to be the most intelligible were the same conditions that were perceived to be the noisiest. The perception of intelligibility and noisiness depended on the interaction of hearing aid manufacturer and noise reduction setting (p.001, effect size=.77) for hearing aids with WN + NR and depended on both hearing aid manufacturer (p

Objective Differences Between Premium and Mid-level Digital Hearing Aids

Objective Differences Between Premium and Mid-level Digital Hearing Aids
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 53
Release: 2018
Genre:
ISBN:

This ongoing study compared premium and mid-level hearing aids from major manufacturers on noise reduction and general electroacoustic characteristics. The findings of this study will contribute to the scarce independent literature evaluating currently available hearing aid technology. Measuring the overall gain reduction in response to a steady state noise can objectively test noise reduction. However, such a method does not specifically test a hearing aid's ability to reduce speech in specific narrow frequency bands. Hanline & Rout (2008) developed a set of stimuli to evaluate multichannel noise reduction algorithms more precisely. We used these stimuli to test noise reduction abilities of hearing aids. Premium and mid level digital hearing aids from four major manufacturers were obtained and programmed for mild to moderately severe sloping SNHL using the manufacturer's proprietary fitting formula. Each hearing aid was programmed for noise reduction ON and OFF with every other feature disabled (or minimized). Hearing aid programming was verified, and each hearing aid was tested twice for reliability. Three different bandwidths of steady-state noise (1/3 oct, 1 oct, 2 oct) were embedded at six different frequencies (0.5, 1, 2, and 4 kHz) resulting in 12 new stimuli. In addition, a 30 second steady state speech shaped noise was included to evaluate the attack time and overall gain reduction of each noise reduction algorithm. The findings of this study suggest that there is no difference between the noise reduction efficiency of a premium level hearing aid when compared to a mid-level instrument at reducing steady state background noise. The frequency specific data indicated that there was a significant difference in the noise reduction capabilities of a mid-level and premium level hearing instrument when the background noise included both speech and background noise, as simulated by the ICRA stimuli. ICRA stimuli was created by the International Collegium for Rehabilitative Audiology for the purpose of analyzing hearing aids, as it employs spectra shaped speech like noise (Dreschler et al., 2001). There was also a significant interaction between technology level and noise bandwidth as well as a significant main effect of noise bandwidth.

Noise Reduction in Speech Processing

Noise Reduction in Speech Processing
Author: Jacob Benesty
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2009-04-28
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 364200296X

Noise is everywhere and in most applications that are related to audio and speech, such as human-machine interfaces, hands-free communications, voice over IP (VoIP), hearing aids, teleconferencing/telepresence/telecollaboration systems, and so many others, the signal of interest (usually speech) that is picked up by a microphone is generally contaminated by noise. As a result, the microphone signal has to be cleaned up with digital signal processing tools before it is stored, analyzed, transmitted, or played out. This cleaning process is often called noise reduction and this topic has attracted a considerable amount of research and engineering attention for several decades. One of the objectives of this book is to present in a common framework an overview of the state of the art of noise reduction algorithms in the single-channel (one microphone) case. The focus is on the most useful approaches, i.e., filtering techniques (in different domains) and spectral enhancement methods. The other objective of Noise Reduction in Speech Processing is to derive all these well-known techniques in a rigorous way and prove many fundamental and intuitive results often taken for granted. This book is especially written for graduate students and research engineers who work on noise reduction for speech and audio applications and want to understand the subtle mechanisms behind each approach. Many new and interesting concepts are presented in this text that we hope the readers will find useful and inspiring.

Hadamard Matrices and Their Applications

Hadamard Matrices and Their Applications
Author: K. J. Horadam
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2007
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 069111921X

In Hadamard Matrices and Their Applications, K. J. Horadam provides the first unified account of cocyclic Hadamard matrices and their applications in signal and data processing. This original work is based on the development of an algebraic link between Hadamard matrices and the cohomology of finite groups that was discovered fifteen years ago. The book translates physical applications into terms a pure mathematician will appreciate, and theoretical structures into ones an applied mathematician, computer scientist, or communications engineer can adapt and use. The first half of the book explains the state of our knowledge of Hadamard matrices and two important generalizations: matrices with group entries and multidimensional Hadamard arrays. It focuses on their applications in engineering and computer science, as signal transforms, spreading sequences, error-correcting codes, and cryptographic primitives. The book's second half presents the new results in cocyclic Hadamard matrices and their applications. Full expression of this theory has been realized only recently, in the Five-fold Constellation. This identifies cocyclic generalized Hadamard matrices with particular "stars" in four other areas of mathematics and engineering: group cohomology, incidence structures, combinatorics, and signal correlation. Pointing the way to possible new developments in a field ripe for further research, this book formulates and discusses ninety open questions.

Electroacoustic and Behavioural Evaluation of Hearing Aid Digital Signal Processing Features

Electroacoustic and Behavioural Evaluation of Hearing Aid Digital Signal Processing Features
Author: David Suelzle
Publisher:
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2013
Genre:
ISBN:

Modern digital hearing aids provide an array of features to improve the user listening experience. As the features become more advanced and interdependent, it becomes increasingly necessary to develop accurate and cost-effective methods to evaluate their performance. Subjective experiments are an accurate method to determine hearing aid performance but they come with a high monetary and time cost. Four studies that develop and evaluate electroacoustic hearing aid feature evaluation techniques are presented. The first study applies a recent speech quality metric to two bilateral wireless hearing aids with various features enabled in a variety of environmental conditions. The study shows that accurate speech quality predictions are made with a reduced version of the original metric, and that a portion of the original metric does not perform well when applied to a novel subjective speech quality rating database. The second study presents a reference free (nonintrusive) electroacoustic speech quality metric developed specifically for hearing aid applications and compares its performance to a recent intrusive metric. The non-intrusive metric offers the advantage of eliminating the need for a shaped reference signal and can be used in real time applications but requires a sacrifice in prediction accuracy. The third study investigates the digital noise reduction performance of seven recent hearing aid models. An electroacoustic measurement system is presented that allows the noise and speech signals to be separated from hearing aid recordings. It is shown how this can be used to investigate digital noise reduction performance through the application of speech quality and speech intelligibility measures. It is also shown how the system can be used to quantify digital noise reduction attack times. The fourth study presents a turntable-based system to investigate hearing aid directionality performance. Two methods to extract the signal of interest are described. Polar plots are presented for a number of hearing aid models from recordings generated in both the free-field and from a head-and-torso simulator. It is expected that the proposed electroacoustic techniques will assist Audiologists and hearing researchers in choosing, benchmarking, and fine-tuning hearing aid features.