News

New TTW project for Richard Hendriks and Jorge Martinez

• Thursday, 24 June 2021

This week Richard Hendriks received the news that his project proposal 'Personalized Auditory Scene Modification to Assist Hearing Impaired People' was granted funding from NWO TTW. Co-applicant is Jorge Martinez. The project will fund 2 PhD students. Congratulations!

Hearing impairment has become a serious problem for a large and increasing portion of the population as is shown by its prevalence: 11 % of the Dutch population suffers from severe hearing loss. These numbers show that hearing impairments form an important societal problem. It comes with many daily life problems in both private situations and working environments. Moreover, hearing-impaired people are often less confident in practical situations, need more assistance and have a worse quality of life. The underlying reasons are that hearing-impaired people suffer from a) the inability to understand speech in acoustic challenging situations, and, b) the inability to correctly localize sound sources. The goal of this project is to make the hearing impaired user fully benefit from an improved intelligibility and sound localization. To do so, we will develop an algorithm to personalize the presented auditory scene for improved speech intelligibility and sound localization for hearing impaired users.