New generation intelligent hearing prosthetics

This article describes an endeavor to help the hearing impaired through the use of neuro-fuzzy methodologies to tune prosthetic hearing devices in an efficient and tractable manner. The integration of a graphical user interface, a hearing aid emulator module and a fuzzy inference engine into the framework of an intelligent tool that can be used to tune prosthetic hearing devices is described. The graphical user interface permits the extraction of perceptual information pertaining to the patient's aural response to test stimuli in the form of speech patterns. This interface could significantly reduce the role of the acoustician in fine-tuning the hearing aid thereby reducing possible human error and facilitating a more direct involvement of the patient in the tuning procedure. A hearing aid emulator permits one to test the working of the entire tool in a device independent fashion. The test speech patterns are passed through a filter bank that mimics the frequency response of the hearing aid. Testing, simulation results and possible future work form the remainder of the paper.