CONVERSATION ASSISTANT FOR NOISY ENVIRONMENTS

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed work is aimed at developing new devices to assist multi-way face-to-face conversation in noisy environments. The development of these devices was motivated by the experience, especially common for older persons, of having great difficulty conversing in noisy settings such as restaurants. Current wireless assistive listening devices for this situation enable one person (usually assumed to be hearing-impaired and possibly using a hearing aid) to receive enhanced signals from multiple talkers. Such systems do not provide assistance to more than one person in a group, nor do they allow the user to listen easily and selectively to a particular talker in a group. The proposed CANE systems make use of a novel combination of signal modulation and transmission techniques to achieve multi-way speech pick-up, amplification and delivery by earphone for each person in a group. Each talker's speech is picked up with either a lavaliere or a head-boom microphone and transmitted to all members of the group. Through head pointing, each group member using a receiver is able to select the talker to be heard. CANE technology will be used in the development of products for persons, hearing aid users or not, who need listening assistance in noise. The expected ease of operation and low cost of CANE devices suggest an application in noisy workplaces. CANE can be easily integrated into protective headsets to enable natural and private face-to-face communication in high- noise workplaces. Work in Phase 1 will develop three prototype systems - two versions for the social-conversation scenario and one integrated into a muff-type hearing protector. The work will focus on three areas: 1) circuit design to maximize audio performance with minimal size, cost, and power drain; 2) ergonomic design to optimize product usability, taking into account the variety of use scenarios and issues such as privacy and tolerance to natural head movements; 3) a set of speech reception experiments to demonstrate and quantify the benefit of the device to the listener and uncover potential problems to be solved. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This project is aimed at developing listening devices to assist face-to-face conversation in noisy surroundings. The design of the devices will enable users to select a talker to be listened to by head-pointing. Such devices will be useful for people who have difficulty hearing in background noise, whether they use hearing aids or not. They will also be useful for assisting communication in noisy workplaces.