Saketh Sharma, Nitya Tiwari, & Prem C. Pandey 8th Int. Conf. on Intelligent Human Computer Interaction (IHCI 2016), 12-13 December, 2016, Pilani, Raj., India, Paper No. 81 (Session III, Tue., 13th Dec., 1130 – 1300) Implementation of a Digital Hearing Aid with User-Settable Frequency Response and Sliding-Band Dynamic Range Compression as a Smartphone App Saketh Sharma, Nitya Tiwari, & Prem C. Pandey {sakethsharma, nitya, pcpandey} @ ee.iitb.ac.in IIT Bombay

Abstract Persons with sensorineural hearing loss suffer from degraded speech perception caused by frequency-dependent elevation of hearing thresholds, reduced dynamic range and abnormal loudness growth, and increased temporal and spectral masking. For improving speech perception by persons with moderate loss of this type, a digital hearing aid is implemented as an Android-based smartphone app. It uses sliding-band dynamic range compression for restoring normal loudness of low-level sounds without making the high-level sounds uncomfortably loud and for reducing the perceptible temporal and spectral distortions associated with currently used single and multiband compression techniques. The processing involves application of a frequency dependent gain function calculated on the basis of critical bandwidth based short-time power spectrum and is realized using FFT-based analysis-synthesis. The implementation has a touch-controlled graphical user interface enabling the app user to fine tune the frequency- dependent parameters in an interactive and real-time mode. Keywords: Dynamic range compression, hearing aid, interactive settings, sensorineural hearing loss, smartphone app

Examples of processing

Example of processing for frequency-dependent linear gain (Input: Constant amplitude tone, swept from 100 Hz to 10 kHz over 10 s) Settings panel Input Processed output

Example of processing for compression (Input: Amplitude-modulated 1 kHz tone) Settings panel Input Processed output

Example of processing of speech signal (Input: English sentence “you will mark ut please” repeatedly concatenated with different scaling factors) Settings panel Input Processed output