Context Recognition for Adaptive Hearing-Aids

Currently how to make the hearing aids more and more intelligent has attracted our interests. In order to realize adaptive amplification strategy to improve the audibility, context-aware hearing is crucial. In context-aware hearing, a big difficulty to be solved is context sensing since it is not applicable to implant multiple sensors in the limited space of hearing devices. Therefore, we propose a new context recognition scheme which adopt smart phone to collect sensing data and infer a scene to adapt level of hearing aid. A context recognition framework with a context reasoning model for scene recognition and activity recognition are given. Once scene and activity are confirmed, the smart phone would send a command to hearing aid to actuate the amplification process by Bluetooth. Since smart phones are carried by people in normal life, employing smart phone to sense context data and inference scene is quite a reasonable way to improve the adaptiveness of hearing aids for most people without any other extra devices or sensors. Our contribution in this paper is that let smart phones stay in pockets or bags as exact normal life, the scene can still be inferred to conduct hearing aids. Besides, we conduct some experiments, the results are encouraging and time cost is acceptable.