The Exchange Improving Unit: An Auditory Device for Directional Filtering: A Second-Year Study

Overview

Objectives/Goals Hearing aids have a fundamental limitation - when used in areas of high ambient noise such as restaurants or public buildings, they amplify background noise as much as desired sounds. This can lead to the user struggling to separate the voices they are listening to from other sounds. The goal of this project was to develop and build a device that would allow hearing aid users to select the directions that they hear from, enabling them to filter out undesirable sounds. Methods/Materials The approach taken was through using an array of four microphones to analyze from which direction each sound harmonic originated, and removing the sound components that fell outside of defined parameters. The processing was performed on an FPGA, with an external Atmega32u4 sending parameters set by a user interface. Results The device is able to effectively determine the directions of origin of sound sources and can filter out noise from all directions. Conclusions/Discussion The limitations of dynamic potential currently limit the quality of sound for music, but the inclusion of CIC filters and even Wavelet Transforms could make the system further optimized. This system is more ideal than shotgun-microphones and similar aids in that this device works with multiple sound sources, for a group setting, and only needs to be setup once with new configurations of speakers. A prototype, with an accurate user interface, is functioning at filtering sounds from undesirable directions.

Awards (1)

• Fourth Place

Competition history

• CSEF 2016 Electronics & Electromagnetics · Entry S0908

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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