WSEAS Transactions on Biology and Biomedicine
Print ISSN: 1109-9518, E-ISSN: 2224-2902
Volume 11, 2014
Adaptive Expert System for Digital Hearing Aids Gain Recommendations Using Linear and Non Linear Prescriptive Procedures
Authors: , , , ,
Abstract: The core object of the work is to design and develop an adaptive expert system, which could perform audiological investigations of hearing impaired subjects, to identify the hearing loss level and to recommend the most appropriate gain values for different frequency bands of a digital hearing aid. We have tested 353 subjects in the age group of 18 to 72; of these, 289 were males and 64 were females and a hearing aid was recommended for 159 subjects. These subjects were fitted with a digital hearing aid, with a first fit formula selected based on the audiogram of the subject, from any one of the standard linear and non linear prescriptive procedures. The standard procedures are formulas from the National Acoustic Laboratory (NAL), Prescription Of Gain Output (POGO), and the Desired Sensation Level (DSL). The recommendations were verified for satisfaction among the hearing aid users with the value of the Speech Discrimination Score (SDS); only 28 were satisfied with NAL-R, 25 were satisfied with POGO II, 23 were satisfied with NAL-NL2 and 12 were satisfied with DSL I/O. The unsatisfied subjects obtained satisfaction, by changing the gain value with the expertise of audiologists, stored in the expert system. Based on the suggested gain values and additional data from the expert audiologists, the gain formula could be made distinct for different language and living conditions
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Keywords: Expert system, Speech intelligibility, Hearing threshold, Real ear insertion gain, Hearing aids, Speech discrimination score, Pure tone average
Pages: 1-9
WSEAS Transactions on Biology and Biomedicine, ISSN / E-ISSN: 1109-9518 / 2224-2902, Volume 11, 2014, Art. #1