Building a platform of hearing aid’s compensative strategy for Mandarin

• Main Authors: Min-Shan Ho, 何旻珊
• Other Authors: Shuenn-Tsong Young
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/22185805515289267763

碩士 === 國立陽明大學 === 醫學工程研究所 === 92 === Due to rapid development of crowded society, people are always exposed to an environment with excess noise; that results in hearing impairment. In addition, age and disease also cause certain hearing problems. Hearing impaired people need hearing aids (HAs) to restore their hearing ability and consequently improve their quality of life. So, HAs are very important for hearing impaired people. At present, the fitting process of HAs is complex and is hindered by the limitations of the HAs’ specifications of. So, the fitting process can’t provide the best compensative effect for hearing impaired people. Namely, HA’s efficacy can’t be optimized. Another issue is that most of the popular fitting strategies are designed for English speakers, not for Mandarin users. It then results that the HAs can’t be fitted suitably for Mandarin speakers in Taiwan. Above all, we will research the platform of hearing aid’s compensative strategy for Mandarin. In order to integrate the features of Mandarin perception and facilitate the fitting procedure, we build a platform for speech discrimination test and a platform for hearing aid’s fitting. The platform is equipped with the NAL fitting strategy and a flexible gain control over 30 frequency bands, and it achieve effective hearing aid’s fitting verifying by speech discrimination score. Besides finding the best compensative curve for individual hearing impaired people, we anticipate that the suitable fitting strategy for Mandarin will be searched through collecting many the best compensative curves of hearing-impaired people.. Furthermore, we will build a suitable process for speech discrimination test for spoken Mandarin. The PTA (pure tone audiogram) of hearing–impaired individual will be mapped into speech banana of conversation speech, and divide the test material into three areas, including hearing area, confused area and no hearing area. Furthermore, the speech discrimination test will be proceeded by selecting suitable test words with confuse words that prevents the subject from conjecturing or remembering test words. The speech discrimination test with high reliability can provide the quantitative target for effective hearing aid fitting , it also keep the conception of hearing aid’s fitting to satisfythe hearing-impaired people.