Quick Individual Fitting Methods of Simplified Hearing Compensation for Elderly People

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.