Design of Low Delay and Low complex Parallel Reconfigurable Filter bank for Hearing aid

Hearing is one the most important sense organs of any human being. It connects the people to the environment around them. Hearing aids provide an opportunity for the hearing disabled people to listen to the environment. However design of a qualitative hearing aid with low cost enables more number of people to utilize the hearing aids for their bright life. Although there are several hearing aid filterbank designs available, it has constraints towards quality, cost, delay and reconfigurability. In this paper a qualitative filterbank design is proposed that has low matching error which leads to good audiogram matching. The proposed design has reduced number of multipliers using half band FIR filter. This reduces the hardware complexity as well as cost of the hearing aid. Also the proposed method is implemented with parallel processing of low pass and high pass bands leading to reduction in the delay to receive the sounds by hearing aid. This avoids interference between speech and visual integration of lip movement. Reconfigurability of the design is one of the important aspects that help in designing the filterbank with different number of bands in different regions (Low pass, High pass and Band pass regions) as well as with different bandwidths. This provides an advantage of using the same filterbank design for different audiograms with different levels of loss in hearing without changing the filter structure.