Electrical and Electronics Commons^™

Improvement Of Speech Perception For Hearing-Impaired Listeners, Fang Du

Theses and Dissertations

Hearing impairment is becoming a prevalent health problem affecting 5% of world adult populations. Hearing aids and cochlear implant already play an essential role in helping patients over decades, but there are still several open problems that prevent them from providing the maximum benefits. Financial and discomfort reasons lead to only one of four patients choose to use hearing aids; Cochlear implant users always have trouble in understanding speech in a noisy environment.

In this dissertation, we addressed the hearing aids limitations by proposing a new hearing aid signal processing system named Open-source Self-fitting Hearing Aids System (OS SF hearing …

Coding Strategies For Cochlear Implants Under Adverse Environments, Qudsia Tahmina

Theses and Dissertations

Cochlear implants are electronic prosthetic devices that restores partial hearing in patients with severe to profound hearing loss. Although most coding strategies have significantly improved the perception of speech in quite listening conditions, there remains limitations on speech perception under adverse environments such as in background noise, reverberation and band-limited channels, and we propose strategies that improve the intelligibility of speech transmitted over the telephone networks, reverberated speech and speech in the presence of background noise. For telephone processed speech, we propose to examine the effects of adding low-frequency and high- frequency information to the band-limited telephone speech. Four listening …