The Raspberry Pi hearing aid

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• Stefan Bleeck, University of Southampton
• Wednesday 28 November 2018, 13:00-14:00
• Room 509A, 5th Floor, EEE Building.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Joan P O'Brien.

Hearing aids are fascinatingly complex miniature devices capable of quite sophisticated signal processing. The most daunting implementation issues come from space imitations, power supply and the fact that all of the processing must happen in around 10 ms to sound acceptable. In this time, a hearing aid records sound, digitizes it,filters it in several bands, compresses and amplifies the sound, reduces noise and feedback, and plays it back. More sophisticated devices can do a lot more like environment classification or software beamforming.

In our lab we use the Raspberry Pi mini-computer to build a hearing aid and around 25 student projects have made significant progress towards a useful product. The purpose of the exercise is to have a portable low powered device that can be freely programmed and ultimately been given to hearing impaired people to wear for a long time in order to test novel signal processing algorithms that otherwise can only ever be tested offline in the booth.

In my talk I will present the current working version of our hearing aid and explain all important signal processing steps. In principle after the talk, everyone should be able to build their own real time hearing device and program any signal processing algorithms that they fancy. I will also give a general overview of the challenges of hearing impairment and how hearing aids can help. I will conclude by giving an outlook how hearables might soon replace hearing aid and reach completely new customer bases.

This talk is part of the Featured talks series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Andrea Picciau's list
• COMMSP & CP list
• COMMSP Seminar
• Featured talks
• Room 509A, 5th Floor, EEE Building
• SAP Talks

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