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International Conference on Intelligent Human Computer Interaction

IHCI 2016: Intelligent Human Computer Interaction pp 173–186Cite as

Implementation of a Digital Hearing Aid with User-Settable Frequency Response and Sliding-Band Dynamic Range Compression as a Smartphone App

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10127))

Abstract

Persons with sensorineural hearing loss suffer from degraded speech perception caused by frequency-dependent elevation of hearing thresholds, reduced dynamic range and abnormal loudness growth, and increased temporal and spectral masking. For improving speech perception by persons with moderate loss of this type, a digital hearing aid is implemented as an Android-based smartphone app. It uses sliding-band dynamic range compression for restoring normal loudness of low-level sounds without making the high-level sounds uncomfortably loud and for reducing the perceptible temporal and spectral distortions associated with currently used single and multiband compression techniques. The processing involves application of a frequency dependent gain function calculated on the basis of critical bandwidth based short-time power spectrum and is realized using FFT-based analysis-synthesis. The implementation has a touch-controlled graphical user interface enabling the app user to fine tune the frequency-dependent parameters in an interactive and real-time mode.

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Acknowledgment

The research is supported by “National Program on Perception Engineering Phase-II” sponsored by the Department of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India

    Saketh Sharma, Nitya Tiwari & Prem C. Pandey

Authors
  1. Saketh Sharma
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  2. Nitya Tiwari
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  3. Prem C. Pandey
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Prem C. Pandey .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. IIT Kharagpur , Kharagpur, India

    Anupam Basu

  2. IIT Madras , Chennai, India

    Sukhendu Das

  3. Telecom SudParis , Evry, France

    Patrick Horain

  4. IIT Guwahati , Guwahati, India

    Samit Bhattacharya

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Sharma, S., Tiwari, N., Pandey, P.C. (2017). Implementation of a Digital Hearing Aid with User-Settable Frequency Response and Sliding-Band Dynamic Range Compression as a Smartphone App. In: Basu, A., Das, S., Horain, P., Bhattacharya, S. (eds) Intelligent Human Computer Interaction. IHCI 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10127. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52503-7_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52503-7_14

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-52502-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-52503-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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