Hearing aids for profoundly deaf people based on a new parametric concept

Abstract

People with severe hearing loss only have a minor part of the frequency range available for reception of information in speech signals. These people do not benefit from normal hearing aids as the information in high frequency parts of the speech is not available. To overcome this problem the authors have developed a new method enabling to present information from the frequency range of interest in the frequency range available for the hearing disabled. By means of parametric modeling of the speech production system, transforming the speech production model to match the available frequency range, and then finally resynthesize the speech using this transformed model, one can present the speech information of interest in a frequency range at choice. This concept is believed to reduce wideband background noise which is a problem for hearing disabled as well as for people with normal hearing ability.<>