Development of a broadcast sound receiver for elderly persons

With the aim of making speech easier to listen to on a TV receiver, a noble method for back-ground-sound suppression processing was proposed, and the results of evaluation tests using broadcast-program sound showed that a prototype device was able to adjust a suitable level of background sound for elderly people. Our proposed method was able to suppress the magnitude of sound components with low correlation by using 2ch stereo signals and perform gain-control only on the speechless intervals. The preparatory evaluation tests confirm that it is possible to suitably reduce program background volume by the proposed method. On the basis of this result, a device for suppressing background sound by decoding the transport stream (TS) of a broadcast program was prototyped. The results of evaluation tests using this device demonstrate that the magnitude of background sound can be adjusted to a suitable level for elderly people.