Background noise is an impediment to conversation for everyone, but for those with hearing loss, noise can be a terrible source of confusion, frustration, and social isolation. The problems of conversing in noise are all too familiar not only for people who have hearing aids or cochlear implants, but also for the millions of people with moderate hearing losses, many of them older than 65 years. This is especially troubling in restaurants or a retirement home's dining hall, which provide pivotal occasions for social interaction. The goal of this project is to develop a low-cost assistive listening device that will make it easy to participate in conversations in noisy environments. The focus is on a device that does its designated task well rather than a system overloaded with extraneous features that detract from its primary purpose. Current wireless assistive listening devices for such situations allow one person to receive enhanced speech signals from multiple talkers, and so do not provide assistance to more than one person in a group. Multi-way communication systems that allow communication among all participants cost more than $1000, making them too expensive for common use. In the proposed system, each person in a group wears a wireless earset with a boom microphone and earphone (similar in form to Bluetooth devices worn on one ear). Speech signals picked up by each microphone are transmitted by radio and processed in such a way that all persons in the group can hear each other as in a conference call. If two or more people speak at the same time, listeners in the group hear the voices overlap naturally. The benefit for speech reception arises from the proximity of the microphone to the talker's mouth, which increases the signal-to-ambient noise ratio by up to 20 dB over that received acoustically at a listener's ear. This figuratively corresponds to speaking directly into every group member's ear at a distance of a few centimeters. The expected ease of operation and low cost of these devices makes them ideal for general use at family gatherings and meals, retirement homes, and restaurants, not only for people with hearing loss but anyone wishing to more easily participate in conversations. Work in Phase I will focus on circuit design to maximize audio performance with minimal size, cost, and power drain, as well as ergonomic design for ease of use. Tests of speech intelligibility in noise will be performed to quantify the benefit to the user. The operational simplicity of this approach will lead to a low-cost and easy-to-use assistive listening product to improve the quality of life of millions of people, especially those with impaired hearing.
- Public Relevance This project is aimed at developing assistive listening devices for people with hearing loss to facilitate face-to-face conversation, particularly in noisy surroundings where hearing aids are of limited use. This will be the first product at a price affordable for the general public that will enable enhanced communication among all members of a group engaged in conversation. This low-cost and easy-to-use assistive listening product can improve the quality of life of the estimated 30 million people in the US with impaired hearing, and for all people who need to communicate in noisy places.
