The binaural auditory steering strategy for hearing aids focuses to achieve a better hearing experience in terms of both “better ear” listening and situational awareness. We have taken into account the binaural auditory spatial processing strategy to optimize the acoustic beamforming filters. We investigate in this paper how human beings achieve better listening with cupped ears based on the head-related transfer function (HRTF) of the subjects with both open ears and cupped ears. We define the metrics better ear index and situational awareness index. We show that cupped ears can significantly improve the better ear index and the open ears has better situational awareness. We can automatically choose one hearing aid with directivity similar to a cupped ear and another hearing aid similar to an open ear to achieve both better intelligibility and situational awareness in certain acoustic environments.

Authors: Ma, Changxue; Dittberner, Andrew B.; de Vries, Rob
Affiliations: GN Resound, Glenview, IL, USA; GN Resound, Eindhoven, The Netherlands(See document for exact affiliation information.)
AES Convention: 141 (September 2016) Paper Number: 9680
Publication Date: September 20, 2016
Subject: Signal Processing

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