Restored sound localization for hearing impaired people

Being hearing impaired has a big impact on someone’s well being. An important problem for hearing impaired people is the disability to correctly localize sound sources. Apart from annoying, this can be dangerous in practical situations (consider the inability to localize sound sources in traffic), and is an important reason why hearing-impaired people are less confident in practical situations, need more assistance and have a worse quality of life. For localization, normal-hearing people rely to a large extend on time differences. However, initial research has shown that very often, hearing impaired people cannot perceive these time differences. This depends on the individual hearing loss and other aging processes. State-of-the-art hearing aid algorithms tend to preserve the acoustic spatial information from the original sound scene. For hearing impaired people this is thus far from effective as, depending on the user’s hearing loss, the preserved spatial cues cannot be heard. With this proposal we will investigate whether it is possible to transform time differences that are inaudible for a specific user, into audible level differences. As the exact frequency range where time differences cannot be heard is user dependent, the envisioned system will be user specific.