The National Institute of Health reports that approximately 36 million American adults report some degree of hearing loss and would benefit from hearing aid use. However, only approximately 20% of potential hearing aid candidates actually use these devices, owing to concerns about stigma, sound quality, and affordability.

The Trouble with Hearing Aids

From the point of the hearing impaired, the person who has a hearing aid simply wants to hear well, and hearing well is a matter of speech perception. Recent comments show the frustration owners that hearing aids owners nearly universally share – they do not work well in noisy environments:

The ability of hearing aids to improve hearing is directly tied to the efficiency of incoming sound wave processing.  Today, sound processing in 90% of all hearing aids is done by digital signal processors (DSP).  DSP’s have hit a wall in terms of performance and power consumption requirements.  Engineers at ON Semiconductor stated over 10 years ago that “…there is not enough processing power to fully stimulate the cochlea.”  Today, hearing aids are still faced with this fundamental limitation that DSP’s, when constrained by a battery cannot deliver the performance that patients demand.

A new approach: Wave Signal Processor

The Audiallo Wave Signal Processor directly addresses the largest concerns that prevent the purchase and use of hearing aids: effectiveness.  The primary aim of the new processor directly attacks this complaint by improving speech perception in noise.   The system mathematically contains a system of functional blocks which make up the total system. These blocks are beam forming, band-pass filtering, noise filtering (noise detection, noise reduction, energy detection) and variable gain control.

Bandpass filter

An example of our approach for a bandpass filter.  The band-pass filter bank has previously been realized in silicon and will be fabricated with gm − C bank approach using a Second-Order-Section (SOS). The resulting decomposed frequencies will be represented as voltages which follow the shape of the waveform of the sound in that frequency.

The cochlea can be modeled a series of band-pass filters and voltage outputs from each band-pass filter circuit relate to the acoustics characteristics in a certain frequency band.

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