A digital hearing aid that compensates loudness for sensorineural hearing impairments

Introduces a digital hearing aid that compensates the signal spoken in sensorineural impaired listeners with the object of improving their intelligibility. The technique used is based on a digital analysis/synthesis of speech; the authors divided the input signal into short time blocks then make a multiband analysis, nonlinear amplification and synthesis based on a sinusoidal model of the voice, according to the subject's dynamic range in that band. This system has been implemented in real-time using a DSP (TMS320C30) based microprocessor board within a host personal computer IBM PC, and one of the principal objectives of the project is to make an easy implementation VLSI system with low consumption for it to be a portable digital hearing aid.