An attention-based sound selective hearing support system: evaluation by subjects with age-related hearing loss

In order to overcome the problems of current hearing aid devices, we proposed an attention-based sound selective hearing support system, where individual target and anti-target sound sources in the environment can be selected, and the target sources in the facing direction are emphasized. New functions were implemented by accounting for system's practicability and usability. The performance of the proposed system was evaluated under different noise conditions, by elderly subjects with different levels of hearing loss. Intelligibility tests and subjective impressions in three-party dialogue interactions indicated clear improvements by using the proposed hearing support system under noisy conditions.