Integrating Signal Processing Modules of Hearing Aids into a Real-Time Smartphone App

This paper presents the integration of three major modules of the signal processing pipeline that go into a typical digital hearing aid as a real-time smartphone app. These modules include voice activity detection, noise reduction, and compression. The steps taken to allow the real-time implementation of this integration or signal processing pipeline are discussed. These steps can be utilized to create similar signal processing pipelines or integrated apps to evaluate hearing improvement algorithms. The real-time characteristics of the developed integrated app are reported as well as an objective evaluation of its noise reduction.