Real time speech rate converting system for elderly people

摘要

The paper presents a new hearing aid system intended to compensate the degradation of perceptual functions in the central auditory pathways which can be found typically with elderly people, while conventional hearing aid systems are effective only for conductive hearing impairments. A typical type of such functional deterioration is the decrease of rate of processing speed for identification of speech and effective cognitive capacity. The new system is designed to compensate it by slowing the input speech rate instead of a direct processing of the related auditory functions. This system enables a user to convert a speech rate as desired by him/her-self on real time, with invariance in pitch as well as small impairments in quality.