A sound-selective hearing support system using environment sensor network

Abstract

We have developed a sound-selective hearing support system by making use of an environment sensor network, so that individual target and anti-target sound sources in the environment can be selected, and spatial information of the target sound sources can be reconstructed. The performance of the selective sound separation module was evaluated under different noise conditions. Results showed that signal-to-noise ratios of around 15 dB could be achieved by the proposed system for a 65 dB babble noise plus directional music noise condition. Subjective intelligibility tests were conducted in the same noise condition. For words with high familiarity, intelligibility scores increased from 67% to 90% for normal hearing subjects and from 50% to 70% for elderly subjects, when the proposed system was applied.