Hardware / Software Architecture for Services in the Hearing Aid Industry

With the growing number of people affected by hearing loss, large research and development efforts have been carried to improve the performance of hearing aids. Although these efforts have proven fruitful, e.g., by improving the speech enhancement algorithms, further work is needed to improve the automatic and individualized selection of such algorithms, enhance services provided by the hearing aid acousticians to hearing aid users, and support their work by increasing the connectivity of hearing aids. This paper provides a brief overview of the connectivity features available in modern hearing aids as well as the recent developments in acoustic scenes classifiers before describing an hardware / software architecture designed to exploit advances made in both those fields. This proposed architecture offers support to both hearing aid users and professionals of the hearing aid industry.