Design and Integration of Alert Signal Detector and Separator for Hearing Aid Applications

Abstract

Alert signals like sirens and home alarms are important as they warn people of precarious situations. This work presents the detection and separation of these acoustically important alert signals, not to be attenuated as noise, to assist the hearing impaired listeners. The proposed method is based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and convolutional-recurrent neural network (CRNN). The developed method consists of two blocks, the detector block, and the separator block. The entire setup is integrated with speech enhancement (SE) algorithms, and before the compression stage, used in a hearing aid device (HAD) signal processing pipeline. The detector recognizes the presence of alert signal in various noisy environments. The separator block separates the alert signal from the mixture of noisy signals before passing it through SE to ensure minimal or no attenuation of the alert signal. It is implemented on a smartphone as an application that seamlessly works with HADs in real-time. This smartphone assistive setup allows the hearing aid users to know the presence of the alert sounds even when these are out of sight. The algorithm is computationally efficient with a low processing delay. The key contribution of this paper includes the development and integration of alert signal separator block with SE and the realization of the entire setup on a smartphone in real-time. The proposed method is compared with several state-of-the-art techniques through objective measures in various noisy conditions. The experimental analysis demonstrates the effectiveness and practical usefulness of the developed setup in real-world noisy scenarios.

Behavioral Validation of the Smartphone for Remote Microphone Technology

“…These preliminary results suggest that the SHARP-2 app can provide a convenient, economical, and significant speech recognition benefit to persons with normal or impaired hearing as well as additional features that may benefit persons with hearing loss. [24][25][26] Further research is in progress to evaluate the benefits of using SHARP-2 with wired headphones, a significantly more economical coupling option, and the development of SHARP-2 fitting controls to account for individual hearing loss.…”

Development and Pilot Testing of Smartphone-Based Hearing Test Application

“…Many advanced adaptive signal processing algorithms have been developed that implement distinct parts of the hearing aid processing pipeline in modern smartphones in real time. The combination of such novel algorithms developed for monaural and binaural hearing applications and the smartphone provide an immensely powerful and cost-effective platform to assist people with hearing disorders [ 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 ]. A crucial part of the hearing aid processing pipeline is appropriate selection of fitting parameters (i.e., compression) based on the listener’s levels of hearing sensitivity.…”