Improvement of Speech Intelligibility in Noise. Development and Evaluation of a New Directional Hearing Instrument Based on Array Technology

摘要

Owing to background noise, speech intelligibility will be below the limit for satisfactory communication in a lot of practical, daily situations. This is especially a problem for people with a perceptive hearing loss due to disease, noise exposure and aging of the hearing organ, a common phenomenon in this age with its increasing number of elderly people. Owing to the decreased sound discrimination, speech sound of the partner in the discussion and background noise can no longer be separated. The results of the thesis show that for these situations a significant improvement of the speech intelligibility can be achieved by the use of a highly directional microphone array. The microphone arrays proposed in the thesis are very suitable for combining with a pair of spectacles. The spectacles with microphone array can be used in combination with a standard hearing instrument: the view direction is the listening direction. It may be expected that in the near future the spectacles with a microphone array will be a very important hearing instrument for improvement of the speech intelligibility.