Automatic power-off for binaural hearing instruments

Abstract

Users of state-of-the-art hearing instruments (HIs) switch their devices on and off by closing and opening the battery compartment. Switching the HIs off is important for the users to maintain the battery lives of their HIs. However, users currently need to switch off their devices manually, which is easy to forget or which can be difficult, e.g. for elderly with reduced dexterity. In this work, we propose an approach to avoid the need to manually switch off HIs. We assume, that whenever the user’s HIs are not moved the same way, they cannot be at the user’s ear and are, thus, not in use. We exploit the binaural communication between the user’s HIs available in the latest generation of HIs together with the concept of multimodal HIs, which integrates sensors such as accelerometers. On a data set of one hour comprising acceleration data of two HIs worn by three male participants (age 26-31) we achieve a precision of 100% and a recall of 93% in detecting power-off events.