Assessing the Utility of Mobile Applications with Support for or as Replacement of Hearing Aids

Hearing aids are becoming more and more important in an aging society. One of the main aspects is speech intelligibility. This requires algorithms that separate speech signals from other sources of sound and filter the latter ones away from the source. Such algorithms have a high computational cost and are usually not employed on hearing aids themselves. Most importantly, algorithms implemented on embedded systems like on hearing aids are not universally portable to any other device, whereas such flexibility exists to a much higher degree on smartphone operating systems. The growing prevalence and high processing power of smartphones (including their operating systems) on the market gives rise to the idea of running the algorithms on a smartphone app instead (after recording the input signal with multiple microphones attached to the phone), and having the results sent to a hearing aid for playback. A state-of-the-art assessment of mobile applications that provide related functionality is necessary to determine the necessary fields of improvement and to determine technical, already feasible solutions and applied features in the market. This requires a detailed development of criteria that effectively and formally measure the utility of such applications. This paper develops such criteria and demonstrates a way to apply them in practice