Development of a Software-Based Simulation Platform for Hearing Aid – Simulation of Unitron, Widex, ant Oticon Noise Reduction Strategy

• Main Authors: Zong-Ying Shen, 沈宗穎
• Other Authors: Chao-Min Wu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/37143206874436702320

碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 電機工程研究所 === 99 === The purpose of this study was to add two noise reduction strategies of hearing aid companies, Widex(Lynge, Denmark) and Unitron(Kitchener, Ontario, Canada), and modified Oticon’s (Copenhagen, Denmark) noise reduction strategy to the previously developed software-based simulation platform for hearing aid from our group. The modified software-based simulation platform allows user to experience more and different hearing aid’s noise reduction method, and choose suitable hearing aid. In this research, we simulated noise reduction by using patent documents of Widex, Unitron and Oticon in addition to the existing GN ReSound(Bloomington, MN, U.S.A.) and Sonic Innovation’s(Salt Lake, UT, U.S.A.). User could evaluate the noise reduction efficiency by using subjective quality evaluation (waveform, spectrogram and listening) as well as objective quality evaluation (segmental signal to noise ratio, SNRseg, log-spectral distance and Mel-scale Frequency Cepstral Coefficients distance, MFCC distance). The results showed that all three added hearing aid company’s methods could reduced noise effectively,and reserved most of speech information. Further comparison showed that noise reduction of GN ReSound had the best performance in all evaluations while Widex performed better in high background noise environment.