• Dr. Alka Singh
• Dr. Navin Kumar

An estimated 63 million people suffer from significant hearing loss in India According to a study by the World Health Organization, five million Indian children were suffering from hearing and speech impairment in 2016. In India, “hearing handicapped” as defined by the Rehabilitation Council of India Act., 1992, is – hearing impairment of 70 dB and above, in better ear or total loss of hearing in both ears. This law is applicable to only those persons with severe hearing impairment whose hearing loss is 70 dB and above.Hearing aids have advanced significantly over the past decade, primarily due to the maturing of digital technology. The next decade should see an even greater number of innovations to hearing aid technology, and this article attempts to predict in which areas the new developments will occur. Both incremental and radical innovations in digital hearing aids will be driven by research advances in the following fields: (1) wireless technology, (2) digital chip technology, (3) hearing science, and (4) cognitive science. The automatic estimation of DOA is very important for many practical applications such as in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Speaker Tracking, Teleconferencing, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) in particular and Human Machine Interface (HCI) in general, Robotic Audition or Active Audition, Blind Signal Separation (BSS) etc. For a human being it is very easy to infer position of active sound source due to a pair of spaced ear, but when it comes to design a system for the performance of similar task by a computer or a machine it becomes very difficult. The two ears, eyes in biological system like us represent a natural array of sensors. Following the same, concept of using array of sensors, in place of single sensors, developed in the engineering applications to exploit spatial diversities of the signal being captured. The poor performance of the conventional hearing aids in background noise motivated the use of microphone array to create directional sensitive hearing aids that amplify the signal arriving in a particular direction. Microphone array is used to improve desired speech signal when the interference arises from different directions. The microphone array is considered as a preprocessor, followed by conventional hearing aid processing [2]. It is used to improve the SNR value and speech intelligibility. Microphone array is used in various applications such as audio, teleconference, voice recognition applications.

"Robust And Most Efficient Hearing Aid Using Microphone Array", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.6, Issue 5, page no.757-760, May-2019, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIRCJ06158.pdf

"Robust And Most Efficient Hearing Aid Using Microphone Array", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.6, Issue 5, page no. pp757-760, May-2019, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIRCJ06158.pdf