While hearing aids help hearing impaired listeners amplify the sounds around them, they cannot restore their hearing to that of a normal hearing person. Reverberation and background noises in our surrounding acoustic environments in particular is greatly detrimental to hearing aids users, affecting how well they can understand speech and thus hindering communication. Even something as simple as talking at the dining table, a hearing aid user may find it difficult to catch what others are saying due to the reverberation and background noises in the room. One possible solution is to have a tabletop microphone system like those found in conference rooms that can directly feed to the hearing aids via bluetooth. Bluetooth function on a hearing aid is commonly used to connect hearing aids users to their devices for entertainment.
This project follows on from a previous project that developed a low-cost tabletop sysem that utilised a microcontroller. The current project will create a mobile application that does similarly to improve hearing aid users’ experience in understanding conversation in a common situation such as chatting at home. If time permits, machine learning solutions can also be applied to the device. The project will involve implementation of such a system, and conducting experiments using the platform developed to measure its performance.
Students suitable for this project should be interested in hearing sciences and technologies, acoustics, and software and hardware development. They should also have competent software skills.
Undergraduate
As this project requires fundamental knowledge in digital signal processing, at least one of the group members must have passed MECHENG370 Electronics and Signal Processing and MECHENG313 Design of Real-time Software Systems (i.e. the team must have at least one Mechatronics student).
Taking MECHENG726 in Part4 S2 would help students understand theories and techniques useful for the project (enrollment is not a requirement).
Experience with MATLAB, C++ and/or C# amd mobile app development will be desirable.
Familiarity with, and/or an interest to learn about:
Acoustics Lab (City 422.154, Lab)