Hearing aids

Hearing loss

many forms:

Common : body aging process Cumulative exposure of ears to sound Changes occur over time Sometimes, 30-50 % or more of sensory 30cells in the inner ear suffer irreparable structural damage Only choice becomes: wear hearing aids

Hearing impairment is either by loss in Sensitivity (loss in perceived loudness) or loss in ability to discriminate different speech sounds or both - Loss of loudness: due to either increased mechanical loudness: impedence between outer ear and inner ear or by reduced sensitivity of the sensory organ of hearing. hearing. - Loss of discrimination ability: damage to sensory organ or ability: neural structures - Hearing impaired listeners- more difficulty in understanding listenersspeech in background noise than normal listeners

Basic Hearing Aid Structure

All Hearing Aids Are Alike

  

Sound goes in the Microphone. Sound gets amplified. Sound comes out the Speaker into your Ear

Types

   

Behind The Ear (BTE) In The Ear (ITE) In The Canal (ITC) Completely In the Canal (CIC)

BTE
  

  

Attached to earmold Powerful Can have open earmolds Less repair problems Less feedback Telecoils

Conventional hearing aid



 

 

Basic functional parts: microphone and associated prepre-amplifiers, an AGC, a set of active filters, a mixer and power amplifier, an output transducer/ receiver Total circuit works on battery Use of multiple channels in this design provides different compression characteristics for different freq ranges Cross over frequencies/ compression characteristics can be adjusted with potentiometers TransducerTransducer- microphone realized in integrated form with FET pre-amplifier pre-

Receiver electromagnetic devicedevicewhich drives miniature diaphragm to produce acoustic output Acoustic output is routed to ear mould through flexible tubing whose freq response can be altered to boost high freq response Latest hearing aids - programmable

Digital hearing aid



Major parts:
Microphone, ADC, DSProcessor,DAC Receiver, two port memory Typical microphone- internal noise 20db SPL(sound microphonepressure level) Total dynamic range required for ADC -80db: achieved by 14 bit ADC DSP fixed (wired program) digital processing device containing array of adders, multipliers and registers It is associated with 2 port memory store processing parametersparameters- that can be downloaded from external programmerto hearing aid

Digital hearing aids also implemented using CMOS technology feature size -1 um/less , estimated power consumption of 20um Digital aids promise: superior signal processing, ease in fitting and stable long term performance

Potential areas of improvement



 

Shaping the frequency response to invert the patient s hearing loss, enhancing the signal to noise ratio with adaptive filtering, reducing acoustic feedback, compressing/ expanding signals with minimum distortion. distortion.

Cochlear implants


Treatment of choice for sensori- neural deaf sensoriprosthesis/ cochlear implant

cochlear

SensoriSensori-neural deafness- caused by cochlear damage or by deafnessdamage within auditory nerve or to neurons of central auditory system If the damage to the auditory system is peripheral in the inner ear, then a cochlear implant can be used In general design, cochlear implant- sound is decomposed implantinto frequency bands of use for the transmission and reception of speech, and critical features of the signal within those freq bands are delivered to auditory neurons via an array of electrodes.

Single channel implants- one electrode implantsMulti channel an electrode array is inserted in cochlear , so that different auditory nerve fibres can be stimulated in different places

Different types of cochlear implants



Different characteristics:
Electrode design: Number and configuration Type of stimulation : analog/ pulsatile Transmission link: Tanscutaneous/ percutaneous Signal processing: waveform representation/ feature extraction