Developing and validating a hearing impairment simulator
Abstract
Purpose
Hearing impaired users often find it difficult to listen to voice over television, computer or public announcement systems due to background noise, music or poor sound quality. This paper presents a hearing impairment simulator that can help digital content developers to understand the auditory perception of hearing impaired users. Existing hearing impairment simulations often fail to publish results on validation or running the system on stored files. The present work describes validation result on a hearing impairment simulator and link to download the system that can simulate any sound stored as a wav file.
Design/methodology/approach
This work presents a simulator with a downloadable link to the software and results on a couple of user trials involving users with varying degrees of hearing impairment validating the system. The simulator also simulates frequency smearing which is not available in most online hearing impairment simulators. The simulator is part of a bigger project which also involves simulating visual, cognitive and motor impairment.
Finding
The result shows the present implementation can accurately simulate hearing perception for spoken voice. It also demonstrates that both frequency attenuation based on audiogram response and smearing are needed for accurate simulation as random frequency attenuation does not distort the sound well enough to be inaudible.
Research limitations/implication
It should be noted that this simulation is not accurate enough to be used for medical purpose, rather aims to be an engineering tool to simulate approximately correct auditory perception of hearing impaired people. However, like other researches on user modelling and simulation in HCI, this simulator aims to enhance the design space where designers can optimize volume and quality of sound output and if necessary of background music or noise.
Practical implication
This paper presents a hearing impairment simulator that can help digital content developers to judge the sound quality of their content for hard of hearing users.
Originality/value
Existing literature on hearing impairment simulators either presents a software without detailed result on validation or focuses on detailed theoretical results on psychology without any easy deployable software. Most existing software also does not allow running simulation on stored file which limits their purpose. This work presents a simulator with a downloadable link to the software and results on a couple of user trials involving users with varying degrees of hearing impairment validating the system. The simulator also simulates frequency smearing which is not available in most online hearing impairment simulators.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Prof Brian Moore of University of Cambridge for sharing codes of his smearing algorithm, Prof Simon Godsill for helping in signal processing and Mr John Hazelwood of University of Cambridge and Thomas Fiddian from Action on Hearing Loss for their invaluable help in organizing the user trials. The authors also thank all participants who took part in our trials. Portions of this work were conducted within the EU funded GUIDE project.
Citation
Biswas, P., Aslan Aydemir, G. and Langdon, P. (2013), "Developing and validating a hearing impairment simulator", Journal of Assistive Technologies, Vol. 7 No. 3, pp. 160-171. https://doi.org/10.1108/JAT-07-2012-0012
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited