Simple circuit for hearing aid device

Abstract

Current state-of-art hearing aids are highly advanced and complex devices, embedding tremendous amount of processing power to improve the comfort of hearing impaired people. As most of the high technology devices, modern hearing aids are dedicated to the market of highly developed countries, which dictates the price range and the performance. On the other hand, there is a colossal unfulfilled need of low-cost, affordable hearing aid for developing and third world countries, which requires a completely new approach to the design. This work describes, analyzes and evaluates a proposition of such low-cost hearing aid. The prototype was built using Silicon Labs EFM32 Zero Gecko Board, allowing testing computational capabilities of simple microcontroller in context of real-time audio processing. The final conclusions sum up the performance analyzes and discuss the recommendations for possible future improvements based on this prototype. Suggestions include lowering requirements to the minimum recommended by WHO, performing detailed analysis of the final cost of a hearing aid and using a system with higher processing capabilities.