A Machine Learning Approach to Fitting Prescription for Hearing Aids

Mondol, Lee
2019 Electronics  
A successful Hearing-Aid Fitting (HAF) is more than just selecting an appropriate HearingAid (HA) device for a patient with Hearing Loss (HL). The initial fitting is given by the prescriptionbased on user's hearing loss; however, it is often necessary for the audiologist to readjust someparameters to satisfy the user demands. Therefore, in this paper, we concentrated on a new applicationof Neural Network (NN) combined with a Transfer Learning (TL) strategy to develop a fittingalgorithm with the
more » ... prescription database for hearing loss and readjusted gain to minimize the gapbetween fitting satisfaction. As prior information, we generated the data set from two popularhearing-aid fitting software, then fed the training data to our proposed model, and verified theperformance of the architecture. Pondering real life circumstances, where numerous fitting recordsmay not always be accessible, we first investigated the number of minimum fitting records requiredfor possible sufficient training. After that, we evaluated the performance of the proposed algorithmin two phases: (a) NN with refined hyper parameter showed enhanced performance in compareto state-of-the-art DNN approach, and (b) the TL approach boosted the performance of the NNalgorithm in a broad way. Altogether, our model provides a pragmatic and promising tool for HAF.
doi:10.3390/electronics8070736 fatcat:vsbq3qsptrht5b3nxitj6z37e4