Widex A/s

Martin Hansen

Carsten Paludan-Muller

Carsten Paludan-MÜLLER

A hearing aid () having a microphone (), a processor () and an output transducer (), is adapted for obtaining an estimate of a sound environment, determining an estimate of the speech intelligibility according to the sound environment estimate, and for adapting the transfer function of the hearing aid processor in order to enhance the speech intelligibility estimate. The method according to the invention achieves an adaptation of the processor transfer function suitable for optimizing the speech intelligibility in a particular sound environment. Means for obtaining the sound environment estimate and for determining the speech intelligibility estimate may be incorporated in the hearing aid processor, or they may be wholly or partially implemented in an external processing means (), adapted for communicating data to the hearing aid processor via an appropriate link.

Hearing aid and a method for enhancing speech intelligibility

A hearing aid () includes a microphone (), a signal processor () and an output transducer (), and the signal processor () includes a set of audio processing parameters mapped to a set of stored noise classes () and a noise classification block () for classifying the background noise for the purpose of optimizing the frequency response in order to minimize the effects of the background noise. The hearing aid may further include a neural net for controlling the frequency response. A method for reducing a noise component in a signal includes the steps of classification of the noise component, comparing the noise component to a set of known noise components, and adapting the processed audio signals according to a corresponding set of frequency response parameters.

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Oldenburg, Germany

Martin Hansen