The research and development of a hearing aid using state-of-the-art acoustics technology is proposed. Through the use of this new technology, the new hearing aid will have superior performance over commercially available hearing aids in the areas of frequency response stability, distortion characteristics, and occlusion effect. Using the new technology, a hearing aid needs a vent only for static pressure equalization, therefore the vent may reduced in size. The smaller vent leads to a decrease in undesirable feedback from the speaker to the hearing aid microphone. These improvements in performance will result in a more comfortable hearing aid with superior speech intelligibility. This research and development will yield a tested prototype hearing aid.
Ultimately, this research and development will result in a commercially available hearing aid with superiorperformance to any hearing aid produced to date.
