ISCA Archive Interspeech 2006
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2006

Quick individual fitting methods of simplified hearing compensation for elderly people

Kengo Fujita, Tsuneo Kato, Hisashi Kawai

For simplified hearing compensation, which combines a high-frequency boost, pitch shift and speech rate conversion, two quick individual fitting procedures, based on subjective assessments, are proposed. Since conventional individual fitting procedures impose enormous hearing comparisons on a user for decision of an appropriate parameter set, the proposed procedures split the fitting process into two steps, namely a parameter fitting step for each hearing compensation method and a comprehensive combination step, to reduce the number of comparisons. Fitting experiments with twenty elderly subjects over sixty-five showed that the proposed procedures had effect on hearing with an average of only around 20 comparisons, while the conventional procedure requires hundreds of comparisons.