Design of Hearing Aid using Variable Bandwidth Digital FIR Filterbank

Now a days hearing impairment has become the most common problem throughout the world. WHO (World Health Organization) 2021 analysis states that around 430 lakh people that is more than five percent of world’s population require rehabilitation to their hearing loss disability. Without proper hearing one cannot have a good communication with the society that may have impact on his career and life. Therefore, a need for good hearing aid to solve the problem of hearing impairment is very much required. In this paper we have designed a hearing aid filterbank with eight different subbands whose bandwidths can be varied according to hearing impaired person audiogram. By varying the central frequency and bandwidth of each subband we can vary their bandwidth. This variable bandwidth implementation has the advantage of obtaining more precise matching with the hearing-impaired person audiogram and hence least matching error is obtained. With this design we can provide a more qualitative hearing.