An Intrinsically Digital Amplification Scheme for Hearing Aids
- Peter J. Blamey1Email author,
- David S. Macfarlane1 and
- Brenton R. Steele1
https://doi.org/10.1155/ASP.2005.3026
© Peter J. Blamey et al. 2005
Received: 30 April 2004
Published: 10 November 2005
Abstract
Results for linear and wide-dynamic range compression were compared with a new 64-channel digital amplification strategy in three separate studies. The new strategy addresses the requirements of the hearing aid user with efficient computations on an open-platform digital signal processor (DSP). The new amplification strategy is not modeled on prior analog strategies like compression and linear amplification, but uses statistical analysis of the signal to optimize the output dynamic range in each frequency band independently. Using the open-platform DSP processor also provided the opportunity for blind trial comparisons of the different processing schemes in BTE and ITE devices of a high commercial standard. The speech perception scores and questionnaire results show that it is possible to provide improved audibility for sound in many narrow frequency bands while simultaneously improving comfort, speech intelligibility in noise, and sound quality.
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This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.