A highly directional hearing aid has been developed with the aim to give a much higher speech intelligibility thanwith conventional hearing aids. The high directivity is obtained by mounting four microphones in each temple of apair of glasses and performing optimized beam forming. This leads to an averaged directivity index of 9 dB underfree field conditions, without head disturbance. In a recent research program the directivity of this device has beenmeasured with different directivity settings, under free field and diffuse field conditions, with and without headdiffraction. Results are presented of this research, where also a comparison is made with the directivity of aconventional hearing aid. Also the influence of the setting of the superdirective beamforming on the noise sensitivityis shown, indicating that for practical use the directivity should be limited.
展开▼
