Individualized extended range binaural hearing aids optimized for spatial localization and speech intelligibility in complex acoustic environments

Abstract

Hearing restoration might be possible by using hearing aids, which are assistive technology devices that amplify sounds to compensate for the decrease in hearing sensitivity. However, the sound quality that these devices deliver is still suboptimal.
Apart from that, hearing loss can impair spatial hearing, and the conservation of all spatial cues is one major unsolved issue of modern hearing aids. This work presents a research and development plan that aims to carry out a contribution to the state-of-the-art in issues yet to be solved in current hearing aids, like speech intelligibility enhancement under noisy environments and sound source localization along with hearing naturalness improvement. To this end, it is proposed to develop a binaural hearing model for hearing aids that includes algorithms for speech intelligibility enhancement and sound scene classification, and incorporates an individualized, direction-dependent spatial hearing correction function.