We have previously reported a realtime, open-source speech-processing platform (OSP) for hearing aids (HAs) research. In this contribution, we describe a wearable version of this platform to facilitate audiological studies in the lab and in the field. The system is based on smartphone chipsets to leverage power efficiency in terms of FLOPS/watt and economies of scale. We present the system architecture and discuss salient design elements in support of HA research. The ear-level assemblies support up to 4 microphones on each ear, with 96 kHz, 24 bit codecs. The wearable unit runs OSP Release 2018c on top of 64-bit Debian Linux for binaural HA with an overall latency of 5.6 ms. The wearable unit also hosts an embedded web server (EWS) to monitor and control the HA state in realtime. We describe three example web apps in support of typical audiological studies they enable. Finally, we describe a baseline speech enhancement module included with Release 2018c, and describe extensions to the algorithms as future work.
We are developing a real-time, wearable, Open-source Speech-Processing platform (OSP) that can be configured by audiologists and Hearing Aid (HA) researchers for lab and field studies. This contribution describes OSP tools to (i) control the HA state, such as amplification parameters in each subband, (ii) provide stimuli to the user, and (iii) get feedback from the user. The system is based on a web server with interfaces to the HA state, the environment state (e.g., background noise characteristics, reverberation conditions, GPS location, etc.) and the user state (as inferred from ecological momentary assessments). We describe Application Programmer’s Interfaces (APIs) used in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and server side scripting language (e.g., PHP) to create web applications aimed at assessing efficacy of various Hearing Loss (HL) compensation approaches. HTML and PHP are versatile tools and lot easier to develop functional skills compared with software tools used in the OSP. We provide example scripts to run tests such as A/B comparison, American version of the four alternative auditory feature test (AFAAF), etc. Audiologists and hearing scientists can modify these example scripts to create studies aimed at understanding the interactions between HA state, environment and user state and discover novel HL compensation approaches.
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