Objective evaluation system for noise reduction performance of hearing aids

Hearing aid is a device, which can acquire, process and feedback acoustic signal in real-time, it is portable and has low power consumption. Its many technologies will influence the effect of hearing, such as manufacturing technology, adjusting procedure. The key technology that influences the effect of hearing is the noise reduction technology. The performance of noise reduction seriously affects the intelligibility of speech, even the physical and mental health of the people who have diminished or defective hearing. So studying on the evaluation for noise reduction performance of hearing aids has a very important significance. However, there is not a clear system to evaluate the noise reduction of hearing aids in the domestic. In this paper, a complete set of objective evaluation scheme is put forward. At first, acoustic signal will be acquired though the experiment system designed in our work which can simulate real working conditions, then signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and segmental signal-to-noise ratio (segSNR) of signal will be calculated after aligning the output signal and input signal to evaluate the noise reduction performance of hearing aids. The simulation results show that the evaluation method proposed here can evaluate hearing aids automatically and conveniently.