TY - JOUR
T1 - Hat-type hearing aid system with flexible sound directivity pattern
AU - Inoue, Takayuki
AU - Ikeda, Yusuke
AU - Oikawa, Yasuhiro
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
©2018 The Acoustical Society of Japan.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - For speech communication, it is useful to emphasise the sound coming from a target direction. A large-scale microphone array enables a flexible design of the directivity pattern. However, it is difficult to implement a large-sale microphone array onto an ear-type hearing aid system. In this paper, we propose a hat-type hearing aid system composed of 48 MEMS microphones that can increase the flexibility of the sound directivity pattern. We found that it is possible to reduce the number of microphones to be used by considering the hat effect, without affecting the system performance. By compensating the time delays and reducing the number of microphones based on impulse response measurements, the directivity range of the sound directivity pattern was improved by 5 dB. In addition, we conducted a qualitative evaluation that resulted in an intelligibility improvement when using our hearing aid system.
AB - For speech communication, it is useful to emphasise the sound coming from a target direction. A large-scale microphone array enables a flexible design of the directivity pattern. However, it is difficult to implement a large-sale microphone array onto an ear-type hearing aid system. In this paper, we propose a hat-type hearing aid system composed of 48 MEMS microphones that can increase the flexibility of the sound directivity pattern. We found that it is possible to reduce the number of microphones to be used by considering the hat effect, without affecting the system performance. By compensating the time delays and reducing the number of microphones based on impulse response measurements, the directivity range of the sound directivity pattern was improved by 5 dB. In addition, we conducted a qualitative evaluation that resulted in an intelligibility improvement when using our hearing aid system.
KW - Delay-and-sum beamforming
KW - FPGA
KW - MEMS microphone array
KW - Single-bit signal processing
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U2 - 10.1250/ast.39.22
DO - 10.1250/ast.39.22
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85040086875
SN - 1346-3969
VL - 39
SP - 22
EP - 29
JO - Journal of the Acoustical Society of Japan (E) (English translation of Nippon Onkyo Gakkaishi)
JF - Journal of the Acoustical Society of Japan (E) (English translation of Nippon Onkyo Gakkaishi)
IS - 1
ER -