Design and Implementation of a Digital Hearing Aid System with an Improved Speech Intelligibilty

A significant amount of the global population suffers from hearing impairment and a small portion of it makes use of hearing aids. A hearing aid is to make sound audible to a person with hearing loss and to improve their hearing ability. This paper presents efficient digital filter design and implementation approaches for the efficient implementation for a customizable digital hearing aid system. The comparative analysis for various window functions for Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filters is presented. Our experimentation shows that the Kaiser window stood to be the best window function for hearing aid application. Experimental results stated through the time domain analysis and spectrogram plots, demonstrate the effectiveness of the FIR filters. The proposed design approach for the customizable digital hearing aid system helps in improving speech intelligibility and effectively reduce the AWGN noise.