Hearing aids based on smartphone by implementing tympanic membrane and basiliar membrane compression

Hearing Impairment is one of the health problems usually caused by age or exposure to loud sound continuously. Based on World Health Organization, around 360 million people worldwide suffer from hearing loss and 32 million of these are children. Failure of the sound signal to reach the brain is the main cause of hearing loss. Hearing impaired often cannot hear soft sound, cannot hear in noise, and cannot hear sound in certain frequency. One of the solution is to wear hearing aids on the impaired ear. However, hearing aids are pretty expensive and some people cannot afford it. Without hearing aids, hearing impaired won’t be able to understand daily conversation clearly, thus reduce the individual’s ability to communicate with others and their hearing organ will continue to deteriorate. Unaddressed hearing loss also have effect on academic performance of children. Hearing Aids based on smartphone is an inexpensive solution for hearing impairments. Hearing impaired can download the applications in their smartphone so they can use the smartphone as the hearing aids. The application will mimics how ear works by implementing tympanic membrane and basiliar membrane compression. This paper intend to build a hearing aids application on smartphone using algorithm designed to mimic how the human ear works. Application will receive sound input from the microphone and output sound with better quality to the earphone of the hearing impaired. The system have been tested to hearing impaired with different environment (quiet and crowded environment), and they can listen to 79.3% of the given sound. With this satisfying result, we hope that this application will help hearing impaired to hear conversation clearly without the need to buy hearing aids.