Development of a customizable universal digital hearing aid.
This paper presents the development of a digital binaural hearing aid using Texas Instruments' floating point TMS320C3X digital signal-processing chip. The device is referred to as the Customized Universal Digital Listening System (CUDLS). CUDLS uses a wide bandwidth (up to 16 kHz) and incorporates speech enhancement (noise reduction) as an integral part of the device. It is capable of sampling up to two input speech channels at a variable sampling rate. We are currently using a sampling rate of 20 kHz for each channel. We have developed our own customized hardware and software to implement CUDLS in real time with zero processing delay. The system has been designed to make it easy for the therapist to modify its features.