Model Based Parameter Estimation to Assist Hearing Assistive Devices (MOREtoHEAR)

Good hearing is important for people to take part of society. Being hearing impaired has a big impact on someone’s well being, and comes with many daily life problems in both private situations and working environments. Hearing assistive devices, also known as hearing aids, can be used to (partly) compensate one’s hearing loss, or simply improve the hearing of normal hearing people in acoustic challenging conditions. Often reported problems for hearing-impaired people are the inability to understand speech in acoustic challenging situations, and, the inability to correctly localize sound sources. The current generation of hearing aids depend on a large set of parameters from the acoustic scene, often unknown in practice. 

The goal of this project is to jointly estimate all acoustic scene parameters that are required to successfully improve the speech intelligibility and preserve the spatial cues.