Developing subject specific frequency lowering algorithms with simulated hearing loss for the enhancement of sensorineural hearing loss

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2012

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Arıöz, Umut

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The hearing and understanding problems of the people with high frequency hearing loss are covered within the scope of this thesis. For overcoming these problems, two main studies, developing hearing loss simulation (HLS) and applying new frequency lowering methods (FLMs) were carried out. HLS was developed with the suprathreshold effects and new FLMs were applied with different combinations of the FLMs. For evaluating the studies, modified rhyme test (MRT) and speech intelligibility index (SII) were used as subjective and objective measures, respectively. Before both of the studies, offline studies were carried out for specifying the significant parameters and values for using in MRT. For the HLS study, twelve hearing impaired subjects listened to unprocessed sounds and thirty six normal hearing subjects listened to simulated sounds. In the evaluation of the HLS, both measures gave similar and consistent results for both unprocessed and simulated sounds. In FLMs study, hearing impaired subjects were simulated and normal hearing subjects listened to frequency lowered sounds with the specified methods, parameters and values. All FLMs were compared with the standard method of hearing aids (amplification) for five different noisy environments. FLMs satisfied 83% success of higher speech intelligibility improvement than amplification in all cases. As a conclusion, the necessity of using subject-specific FLMs was shown to achieve higher intelligibility than with amplification only. Accordingly, a methodology for selection of the values of parameters for different noisy environments and for different audiograms was developed.

Subject Keywords

Deafness., Rhyme., Audiometry, Speech., Auditory perception., Speech, Speech disorders., Hearing disorders.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12614929/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/22063

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Graduate School of Informatics, Thesis

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Citation Formats

U. Arıöz, “Developing subject specific frequency lowering algorithms with simulated hearing loss for the enhancement of sensorineural hearing loss,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2012.