HEARING AID WITH NOISE-LEVEL-CONTROLLED SELECTIVE AMPLIFICATION

Abstract

One of the major complaints of hearing aid users is their inability to understand speech in noisy environments. We have developed a new hearing aid that uses selective aplification in the speech frequency band utilizing a compression amplifier which automatically compresses the lower frequency range as a function of the level and spectrum of the environmental noise. The output of the LPF is passed through a compression amplifier and then mixed with the signal passing through the HPF. Use of this hearing aid on five hearing impaired patients showed that the environmental noise was decreased and the voice sounds became clearer and more audible.