An Improvement of Speech Hearing Ability for sensorineural impaired listners

감음성(感音性) 난청인의 언어청력 향상에 관한 연구

In this paper, we proposed a method of a hearing aid suitable for the sensorineural hearing impaired. Generally as the sensorineural hearing impaired have narrow audible ranges between threshold and discomfortable level, the speech spectrum may easily go beyond their audible range. Therefore speech spectrum must be optimally amplified and compressed into the impaired's audible range. The level and frequency of input speech signal are varied continuously. So we have to make compensation input signal for frequency-gain loss of the impaired, specially in the frequency band which includes much information. The input sigaal is divided into short time block and spectrum within the block is calculated. The frequency-gain characteristic is determined using the calculated spectrum. The number of frequency band and the target gain which will be added input signal are estimated. The input signal within the block is processed by a single digital filter with the calculated frequency-gain characteristics. From the results of monosyllabic speech tests to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, the scores of test were improved.