Oticon A/s

Bernafon Ag

Thomas Ulrich Christiansen

Jesper Bruun Jensen

Christophe Lesimple

Neil Hockley

Michael Syskind Pedersen

Lars Bramsløw

Martin Kuriger

Claus Forup Corlin Jespersgaard

Adel Zahedi

Karsten Bo Rasmussen

Anders Højsgaard Thomsen

Monika Bertges Reber

Barbara Simon

Kamilla Angelo

A hearing device adapted for being worn at or in an ear of a user, comprises a) an input unit comprising at last two input transducers each for converting sound around said hearing device to an electric input signal representing said sound, thereby providing at least two electric input signals; b) a beamformer filter comprising a minimum processing beamformer defined by optimized beamformer weights, the beamformer filter being configured to provide a filtered signal in dependence of said at least two electric input signals and said optimized beamformer weights; c) a reference signal representing sound around said hearing device; d) a performance criterion for said minimum processing beamformer. The minimum processing beamformer is a beamformer that provides the filtered signal with as little modification as possible in terms of a selected distance measure compared to said reference signal, while still fulfilling said performance criterion. The optimized beamformer weights are adaptively determined in dependence of said at least two electric input signals, said reference signal, said distance measure, and said performance criterion. A method of operating a hearing device is further disclosed. The invention may e.g. be used in hearing aids or headsets.

Hearing device with minimum processing beamformer

A hearing aid comprises a) a multitude of M input transducers each providing an electric input signal representative of environment sound in a time-frequency representation (k, l), and each comprise varying amounts of target (s) and noise (v) signal components; b) a signal processor configured to process said multitude of electric input signals; and comprising a beamformer filter configured to receive said multitude M of electric input signals and to provide a spatially filtered signal and a post-filter configured to receive said spatially filtered signal and to provide an estimate &#x15c;(k,l) of a target signal representing said target signal components from said target sound source. The signal processor is configured to provide estimates of power spectral densities &#x3bb;(k,l) of said target signal components in dependence of inter-frequency bin relationships between the spectral components enforced by properties of the electric input signals across at least some of said frequency bins.

Hearing aid comprising a noise reduction system

A hearing device comprises a) an input unit for providing at least one electric input signal representing sound in a frequency sub-band representation, b) an SNR estimation unit for estimating a signal to noise ratio and/or a level estimation unit for estimating a level of said at least one electric input signal, and c) a configurable frequency transposition unit for transposing content of a source frequency sub-band FBinto a destination frequency sub-band FB. The contents of the modified destination frequency sub-band is determined as a weighted combination of the contents of the source and destination frequency sub-bands according to the expression c1) P=&#x3b1;P+&#x3b2;Por c2) MAG=&#x3b1;MAG+&#x3b2;MAG, wherein Pand MAGand Pand MAGare the unmodified and modified power spectrum and magnitude, respectively, of the destination frequency sub-band, and Pand MAGare the power spectrum and magnitude, respectively, of the source frequency sub-band, and the parameters &#x3b1; and &#x3b2; are destination and source band weight factors, respectively, that specify details of the frequency transposition operation. The weight factors &#x3b1; and &#x3b2; are determined in dependence of the estimate of signal to noise ratio and/or the estimate of level.

Hearing device comprising adaptive sound source frequency lowering

The application relates to a hearing aid system comprising a hearing aid device comprising a configurable signal processing unit, a programming device configured to program the configurable signal processing unit, and a communication link allowing the exchange of data between the hearing aid device and the programming device. The application further relates to a method of programming configurable signal processing unit to provide an increased speech intelligibility by frequency lowering. The hearing aid system is configured to program the configurable signal processing unit of the hearing device according the claimed method. The invention may e.g. be used in hearing aids.

Hearing aid system, a hearing aid device and a method of operating a hearing aid system

A method of programming a configurable signal processing unit of a hearing aid device comprises A purpose of the disclosure is to provide an improved audibility of high frequency sound for users with severe-to-profound hearing losses.

Hearing aid system and a method of programming a hearing aid device

An apparatus for determining cochlear dead region comprising a sound generation unit, an output transducer, and a control unit. The control unit causes the sound generation unit to provide a first electrical sound signal representing a first frequency band adjacent to a frequency region of interest, with a first bandwidth, a first sound pressure level and a first subsequent electrical sound signal representing a first subsequent frequency band comprising the frequency region of interest with a first subsequent bandwidth, a first subsequent sound pressure level, and a first subsequent time delay to the first electrical sound signal. In response, the output transducer generates a first output sound and a first subsequent output sound with the first subsequent time delay. A user compares the first output and first subsequent output sounds and decides, whether he hears a difference between the two sounds and gives a positive or negative decision input.

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Smørum, Denmark

Thomas Ulrich Christiansen