A study on effects of room acoustics on speech perception in hearing impaired-persons and its evaluation method

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The aim of this project was to survey room acoustics for hearing-impaired persons. The room acoustics of reverberation time, noise level and rapid speech transmission index (RASTI) were measured for classrooms, training rooms, playing rooms and auditory test rooms at the four schools for the deaf in Fukuoka prefecture. A few of the classrooms and auditory test room were found to have long reverberation times. The results showed that hearing-impaired students in the rooms might not hear the teacher's speech well. The room acoustics of six public halls in Fukuoka city were measured in the same way. The RASTI value of each public hall was good for normal-hearing persons. However, the RASTI values indicated that it was difficult for the aged persons with mild hearing loss to listen successfully.A new method fir hearing aid fitting was proposed using speech materials with different reverberation times in a soundproof booth The method can evaluate speech recognition scores under a real reverberant environment for hearing-aid wearers. In addition, a prediction method of the usefulness for an FM hearing-aid wearer under reverberation was developed, and acoustic characteristics of a digital hearing aid with an adaptive directional microphone system using a moving sound source were studied.