Research Article The Personal Hearing System—A Software Hearing Aid for a Personal Communication System | Hindawi Publishing Corporation EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing Volume 2009 Article ID591921 9 pages doi 2009 591921 Research Article The Personal Hearing System A Software Hearing Aid for a Personal Communication System Giso Grimm 1 Gwenael Guilmin 2 Frank Poppen 3 Marcel S. M. G. Vlaming 4 and Volker Hohmann1 5 1Medizinische Physik Carl-von-Ossietzky Universitat Oldenburg 26111 Oldenburg Germany 2 THALES Communications 92704 Colombes Cedex France 3OFFIS 26121 Oldenburg Germany 4 ENT Audiology EMGO Institute VU University Medical Center 1007 MB Amsterdam The Netherlands 5HorTech gGmbH 26129 Oldenburg Germany Correspondence should be addressed to Giso Grimm Received 15 December 2008 Revised 27 March 2009 Accepted 6 July 2009 Recommended by Henning Puder A concept and architecture of a personal communication system PCS is introduced that integrates audio communication and hearing support for the elderly and hearing-impaired through a personal hearing system PHS . The concept envisions a central processor connected to audio headsets via a wireless body area network WBAN . To demonstrate the concept a prototype PCS is presented that is implemented on a netbook computer with a dedicated audio interface in combination with a mobile phone. The prototype can be used for field-testing possible applications and to reveal possibilities and limitations of the concept of integrating hearing support in consumer audio communication devices. It is shown that the prototype PCS can integrate hearing aid functionality telephony public announcement systems and home entertainment. An exemplary binaural speech enhancement scheme that represents a large class of possible PHS processing schemes is shown to be compatible with the general concept. However an analysis of hardware and software architectures shows that the implementation of a PCS on future advanced cell phone-like devices is challenging. Because of limitations in processing
