Computer Science and Information Systems 2013 Volume 10, Issue 1, Pages: 483-501
https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS120423012T
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Design of a multimodal hearing system
Tessendorf Bernd (Wearable Computing Lab., ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland)
Debevc Matjaz (University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia)
Derleth Peter (Phonak AG, Stäfa, Switzerland)
Feilner Manuela (Phonak AG, Stäfa, Switzerland)
Gravenhorst Franz (Wearable Computing Lab., ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland)
Roggen Daniel (Wearable Computing Lab., ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland)
Stiefmeier Thomas (Wearable Computing Lab., ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland)
Tröster Gerhard (Wearable Computing Lab., ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland)
Hearing instruments (HIs) have become context-aware devices that analyze the
acoustic environment in order to automatically adapt sound processing to the
user’s current hearing wish. However, in the same acoustic environment an HI
user can have different hearing wishes requiring different behaviors from the
hearing instrument. In these cases, the audio signal alone contains too
little contextual information to determine the user’s hearing wish.
Additional modalities to sound can provide the missing information to improve
the adaption. In this work, we review additional modalities to sound in HIs
and present a prototype of a newly developed wireless multimodal hearing
system. The platform takes into account additional sensor modalities such as
the user’s body movement and location. We characterize the system regarding
runtime, latency and reliability of the wireless connection, and point out
possibilities arising from the novel approach.
Keywords: multimodal hearing instrument, assistive technology