ABSTRACT
Sound perception is a highly individual phenomenon that depends on many factors (e.g., noise, reverberation, individual hearing loss or preferences) and often these factors affect or even impair speech communication. While medical hearing aids can be beneficial in many situations for people with hearing loss, they cannot solve communication problems for people with audiologically normal hearing or the so-called subclinical population with mild, untreated hearing loss. In other words, many people beyond the typical clinical population could potentially benefit from hearing support technologies if they were integrated in application-specific, non-medical devices. Examples include telephone speech in environments with ambient noise or distracting colleagues (like call centres), TV dialogs mixed with too loud background sounds, or hearing protection devices preventing users from communicating with their peers. This contribution presents recent research and development of personalized sound processing schemes, which combine fully self-administered fitting concepts and innovative user interfaces and algorithms. Recent technology trends which could potentially bridge the gap between traditional hearing devices and life-style products or assistive hearables for professional applications are discussed.
