Hearing Aids

Lecture 1

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 History
• The purpose of a hearing aid is to bring sound
effectively to the ear, primarily by making it
louder.
• Earliest published descriptions of hearing aids
did not use the term hearing aid.
• Terms like deaf aids, deaf instruments,
speaking tubes, speaking trumpets and
hearing trumpets were used.

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• These early pre-electric devices served to:
- Collect or concentrate the sound energy at
the ear.
- Bring the sound to a restricted area.
- Resonate to the approximately desired
frequency range.

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• Ear trumpets: one of the first hearing aids.
• Made of cow horns.
• The principle is to concentrate and direct
sound into the external ear canal.

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• Speaking tubes:
• Old fashion personal amplifier.
• Speaker talked into one end, and the hearing
impaired person listened at the other.
• Worked by directing sound into a concentrated
area.
• Acoustic chair:
• For wealthy people. Sound entered the armrest,
and resonated to the ear tube.

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• Carbon hearing aids : They were introduced
around 1900.
• The radio static quality noise in carbon
hearing aids was the most common
compliant. Lots of distortion.
• Even though carbon hearing aids were not
efficient, they were the beginning of the
modern electrical hearing aids.

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 Transistor era
• The transistor became commercially available in
1952.
• The small size of the transistor allowed the
beginning of hearing aids fit on the ear rather
than the torso.
• Head mounting had several advantages:
- Clothing did not create noise as it rubbed the
microphone.
- Cables were no longer required.
- True binaural hearing was possible.

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• With a rapid and continual reduction in the
size of all the components, hearing aid moved
to behind the ear (BTE)
• With further decreases in the size of the
components in the ear (ITE) started to appear
in the mid and late 1950s.

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• Two big leaps in the performance and size of
components occurred during the 1960s.
1- The integrated circuit was applied to hearing
aids. This meant that multiple transistors and
resistors could be combined into a single
component that was similar in size to any one of
the individual transistor that it replaced.
2- A microphone was combined with a new type of
transistor (the field effect transistor) inside a
small metal can.
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• For the first time, a small smooth microphone
with a reasonable wide frequency response
could be used in hearing aid.
• During the transistor era, receiver volume
decreased from 1800 mm cubic to 39 mm
cubic.
• Microphones volume decreased from 5000
mm cubic to 23 mm cubic.

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• By the early 1980. ITE aids had become small
enough for most of the components to fit
within the ear canal, thus creating the in the
canal (ITC) hearing aid.
• With further improvement in battery
chemistry, amplifier efficiency and transducer
size, the entire hearing aid could finally be
located inside the ear canal by early 1990s.
• The completely in the canal (CIC) had arrived.

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• Some of the advances during the transistor
era include:
- Zinc batteries, that allowed a halving of the
battery volume for the same electrical
capacity.
- Wireless transmission hearing aid, in which
the hearing aid contains a wireless receiver
that tuned to a transmitter worn by a talker
some distance away.

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- Class D amplifier, that decreased the battery
drain required to achieve a given output level
with minimal distortion.
- Improved understanding of the acoustics of
the ear molds that allowed more appropriate
gain- frequency responses to be achieved, and
occlusion and feedback problems to be
decreased.

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 Digital era
• In 1986the application of digital control
circuits and digital memories to hearing aids.
• The circuits replaced the potentiometers.
• These circuits enabled the amplification
characteristics of hearing aids to be adjusted
by clinician.
• This enabled the use of the remote control.

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• The real revolution came when the sound
waveform itself was converted to a series of
numbers and manipulated using digital
circuits.
• The first digital aid was a body aid and it was
not a commercial success.
• Finally in 1996, fully digital BTE, ITE and ITC
became commercially available.

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 Basic hearing aid components
• Microphone: it is an energy transducer that
converts mechanical acoustics into analogous,
but weak electric current.
• Microphones act in a linear fashion. If the
pressure of the input signal doubles, the
output voltage also doubles.
• The relationship between the size of the
output voltage and the input sound pressure
is known as the sensitivity of the mic.

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 Microphone
• Microphone imperfections:
• All electronic components generate small
amounts of random electrical noise.
• They are sensitive to vibration, and vibration will
be amplified into an annoying sounds.
• When the HA receiver operates it creates
vibrations as well as sounds. The mic pickups
some of these vibrations, convert them to
electrical signals then amplified by the hearing
aid and passed to the receiver which creates
further vibration.
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• That cause a feedback loop may cause an
audible oscillation.
• HA designers avoid this by careful mounting
and placement of the mic and the receiver.
• If either of these become displaced, the HA
become unstable due to this internal feedback
loop.
• Displacement of the transducers is more likely
to occur for the (ITE), (ITC), (CIC).
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• Another imperfection is the wind noise.
• When wind hits the HA a turbulence is
created, which consists of pressure
fluctuations.
• One way to eliminate the problem by keeping
the mic inlet away from wind and placing the
mic port deep inside the ear canal.
• Another way a mesh screen over the mic port
opening, or using a wind shield.
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