Hearing Aid System Response Improvement

Abstract

This study was conducted to understand the response of hearing aids to different inputs and propose a novel technique to significantly improve performance of hearing aid implants. The motivation behind this study is to represent behavior of hearing aid system with simple input-output relation rather than complicated models. This representation offered a better understanding of the system and inspired an innovation to improve the hearing aid implants. A model of a hearing aid system called cochlear transplants is generated and used to simulate the system response. Using multiple methods, simplified input-output relations are derived. Results from these methods are compared and conclusions are drawn regarding which method is best for this application. One of the methods used resulted in 69.7 % error measure reduction compared to the benchmark method. This method was later used to produce a simplified model, which was then used as the basis for analysis of different configurations. A qualitative comparison of model was made, and significant improvement of cochlear transplants was achieved.