Beschreibung
Despite major improvements in hearing device technology in the past decades, the acceptance of hearing aidsand assistive listening devices is still rather limited, partly due to poor sound quality. Preferably, a hearingdevice should enable hearing that is comparable to the open ear (i.e., acoustic transparency) while providinga desired sound enhancement (e.g., reduction of ambient noise). This is however technically challenging, sincethe hearing device needs to simultaneously deliver the desired enhanced and equalized sound at the eardrumwhile limiting acoustic feedback and occlusion effects. The long-term objective of this project is to achieveacoustically transparent speech communication and hearing support by means of an active multi-input multi-output (MIMO) earpiece with integrated microphones and receivers (see Figures 1 and 2). The main researchquestions are how to optimally exploit the availability of multiple microphones and multiple receivers in the earcanal and in the vent to develop solutions for sound pressure equalization at the eardrum, for acoustic feed-back cancellation, and for active noise and occlusion control. The main challenges exist in making these solu-tions individualized to each user and in developing combined solutions that take into account the interactioneffects between the different objectives.