Real-time Smartphone application for improving spatial awareness of Hearing Assistive Devices

In this paper, we present an improved version of a Speech source Iocalization method for Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation using only two microphones. We also present a real-time Android application on a latest smartphone to help improve the spatial awareness of hearing impaired users. Unlike earlier methods, the proposed method is computationally more efficient and fully adaptive to dynamically changing background noise. We compare the performance of proposed method with similar earlier methods and demonstrate significantly lower DOA estimation errors as well as lower computation times. People who find it difficult to localize speech sources during group conversations or social activities can use the `easy-to-use' Android application. The proposed implementation does not need any additional hardware or external microphone attachments, and can run on any dual-microphone device, such as a smartphone or tablet.