Smartphone-Based Hearing Aid Compression and Noise Reduction

Abstract

This paper presents an assistive hearing smartphone app mimicking the two main functions of hearing aids, consisting of compression and noise reduction. The app is designed to run in real time on smartphones or tablets. Appropriate levels of amplification or gain are activated by selecting a filter from a filter bank for six audio environment situations covering three sound pressure levels of speech and two sound pressure levels of noise. The results of this smartphone app for real-world audio environments are provided, indicating its effectiveness as a real-time platform for studying compression and noise reduction algorithms in the field or in realistic audio environments.