College - Author 1
College of Engineering
Department - Author 1
Electrical Engineering Department
Degree Name - Author 1
BS in Electrical Engineering
College - Author 2
College of Engineering
Department - Author 2
Electrical Engineering Department
Degree - Author 2
BS in Electrical Engineering
Date
6-2025
Primary Advisor
Jenna Kloosterman, College of Engineering, Electrical Engineering Department
Abstract/Summary
The product is a hearing assistance smartphone application which aims to improve the quality of life of people with single-sided hearing loss/deafness by providing them with a cheaper and more reliable alternative to medically-prescribed hearing aids. Due to development setbacks, the product instead uses open-ear earbuds. Since the earbuds are not directly inserted into the user’s ear canals, they will not obstruct the hearing of the user’s non-deaf ear, and the user will still be able to hear the sounds that come from their non-deaf side. Some users may find that Bluetooth earbuds can be quite expensive, but are ultimately still much more affordable than prescription hearing aids.
The product is intended to mimic the hearing of a normal human ear so that it will detect audio within the normal human hearing range. The primary restraint of this project is designing an application that has high enough sound quality to compete with prescription hearing aids, while keeping power consumption on the phone as low as possible for the convenience of the consumer.
This product is mainly software-based, but it uses hardware components from the earbuds and the smartphone to achieve the desired effect. The system flow begins with one of the earbuds’ microphones. The audio signal from the microphone is transmitted to the smartphone, which picks up the signal from its Bluetooth receiver. This signal is converted into a digital signal through a codec and is then processed by the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) module of the application, where filtering, limiting, and other processes are performed. After the signal is processed, it travels through a codec again and is transmitted by the Bluetooth transmitter into the earbuds, where the processed audio plays out of the selected “non-deaf” side. The scope of this year’s work on the product was focused almost entirely on the smartphone application’s UI and DSP development.
URL: https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/eesp/684