JISE


  [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]


Journal of Information Science and Engineering, Vol. 38 No. 2, pp. 397-412


Design and Implementation of a Smart Cost-effective Hearing Aid using Fractional Interpolated Filters


TOMSON DEVIS1 AND MANJU MANUEL
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering
Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology
Kottayam, 686501 India

1APJ Abdul Kalam Technological University
Kerala, 695016 India
E-mail: tomsondevis@gmail.com; manjum@rit.ac.in


A reconfigurable hearing aid is capable of adjusting to various impairments without any modification in the hardware. The design and implementation of a reconfigurable filter bank structure of minimal complexity are proposed in this paper for audiogram matching applications. The hearing spectrum is equally decomposed into four regions, and three different schemes are proposed in each region. The Parks McClellan algorithm based prototype filter is fractionally interpolated and various sub-bands are generated for the reconfigurable filter bank. The proposed smart structure can adapt to the optimum scheme by itself based on the hearing characteristics of the impaired person. The structure is tested with different hearing loss scenarios and the matching errors as well as operational delays are found to be within the tolerable limits. The proposed structure requires only 26 multipliers, which saves the hardware by almost 88% with respect to the existing structures. A power and device efficient hardware implementation of the proposed structure is also realized on Kintex7 FPGA board. In addition to the reduced complexity, the proposed structure has the advantage of minimal hardware, which permits the availability of costeffective hearing aids a reality.


Keywords: audiogram matching, filter bank, hearing aid, reconfigurable, fractional interpolation, frequency response masking

  Retrieve PDF document (JISE_202202_07.pdf)