A Wearable Platform for Research in Augmented Hearing

Abstract

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.

A Wearable, Extensible, Open-Source Platform for Hearing Healthcare Research

“…Our development of OSP has resulted in novel developments in embedded systems design [10], portable electrophysiology [11], [12], adaptive filtering [13], [14], and other areas not yet published. Yet, the primary novelty of OSPand its primary value to the community-is in its system design as a whole, and the capabilities it offers to researchers and users as a result of this design.…”

“…The OSP RT-MHA can still run on any Mac or Linux computer using any audio hardware supported by the respective OS. However, the potential of OSP is much more fully realized in its new wearable form factor which we initially discussed in [10].…”

“…First, for the lab based OSP system [21], we initially implemented a native Android version of the Goldilocks explore-and-select self fitting protocol proposed in [65], [66]. For the wearable system [10] aimed at field studies, we transitioned to web apps for the ease of rapid prototyping and ported Goldilocks as a web app.…”

On Mitigating Acoustic Feedback in Hearing Aids with Frequency Warping by All-Pass Networks

“…We investigate benefits of freping for mitigating acoustic feedback along with LMS based AFC, with the motivation of improving feedback control in the systems described in [1,2,3,4].…”

“…This research is part of the Open Speech Platform (OSP) [1,2,3,4] funded by an NIH/NIDCD initiative to enable psychophysical research beyond what is currently capable in support of hearing healthcare. This paper is related to improving acoustic feedback reduction for form-factor accurate, audiologic research in the field using behind the ear, receiver in the canal (BTE-RIC) transducers, hardware, embedded software, and application software we developed [3,4]. In order to compensate for mild to moderate hearing loss, commercial hearing aids (HAs) and OSP provide an average gain of 35-38 dB.…”