Investigation of Volume Control for Hearing Aids Using a Modified Coherence Speech Intelligibility Index Measurement

This work presents the investigation of volume control for hearing aids using objective speech intelligibility measures. In order to effectively assess the impact of various volume levels on speech intelligibility for the hearing impaired, we propose a new method to measure speech intelligibility by modifying the coherence speech intelligibility index measurement. In the proposed method the one-third-octave filter bank is applied and the coherence function is calculated for each band to estimate the noise and/or distortion components within the corresponding band. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated though experiments on speech signals corrupted with additive noise, peak and center clipping distortions.