Initial Development of a Temporal-Envelope-Preserving Nonlinear Hearing Aid Prescription Using a Genetic Algorithm

Most hearing aid prescriptions focus on the optimization of a metric derived from the long-term average spectrum of speech, and do not consider how the prescribed values might distort the temporal envelope shape. A growing body of evidence suggests that such distortions can lead to systematic errors...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Trends in amplification 2013-06, Vol.17 (2), p.94-107
Main Authors: Sabin, Andrew T., Souza, Pamela E.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic Stimulation
Aged
Aged, 80 and over
Algorithms
Audiometry, Speech
Auditory Threshold
Compressing
Correction of Hearing Impairment - instrumentation
Distortion
Envelopes
Equipment Design
Female
Genetic algorithms
Hearing
Hearing Aids
Hearing Loss, Sensorineural - diagnosis
Hearing Loss, Sensorineural - physiopathology
Hearing Loss, Sensorineural - psychology
Hearing Loss, Sensorineural - rehabilitation
Humans
Male
Middle Aged
Noise - adverse effects
Nonlinear Dynamics
Perception
Perceptual Masking
Persons With Hearing Impairments - psychology
Persons With Hearing Impairments - rehabilitation
Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
Sound Spectrography
Speech
Speech Perception
Temporal logic
Time Factors
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Summary:Most hearing aid prescriptions focus on the optimization of a metric derived from the long-term average spectrum of speech, and do not consider how the prescribed values might distort the temporal envelope shape. A growing body of evidence suggests that such distortions can lead to systematic errors in speech perception, and therefore hearing aid prescriptions might benefit by including preservation of the temporal envelope shape in their rationale. To begin to explore this possibility, we designed a genetic algorithm (GA) to find the multiband compression settings that preserve the shape of the original temporal envelope while placing that envelope in the listener’s audiometric dynamic range. The resulting prescription had a low compression threshold, short attack and release times, and a combination of compression ratio and gain that placed the output signal within the listener’s audiometric dynamic range. Initial behavioral tests of individuals with impaired hearing revealed no difference in speech-in-noise perception between the GA and the NAL-NL2 prescription. However, gap detection performance was superior with the GA in comparison to NAL-NL2. Overall, this work is a proof of concept that consideration of temporal envelope distortions can be incorporated into hearing aid prescriptions.
ISSN:1084-7138
1940-5588
DOI:10.1177/1084713813495981