The initial software fitting prescribed by the fitting formula largely depends on the patient’s hearing loss, which may not be the optimal preference for a particular user. Certain criteria must also be readjusted by an audiologist to meet the user-specific requirements. Therefore, this study focuses on the novel application of a neural network (NN) technique to build a suitable fitting algorithm with prescribed hearing loss and the corresponding preferred gain to minimize the gap between optimized fittings. The algorithm intended to learn the hearing preferences of an individual user such that the initial fitting may be optimized. These findings demonstrate the efficiency of the algorithm, with and without additional features. Using the clinical fitting data, the average mean square error (MSE) for the simple NN algorithm was 5.4183%. By adding additional features to the data, the algorithm performed better, and the average MSE was as low as 5.2530%. However, the algorithm outperformed Company A fitting software, as the MSE was the highest at 5.4748%. As the company’s automatic fitting has a noticeable discrepancy with clinical fitting records, the impeccable results from this study can lead to a better path towards fitting satisfaction, thus benefiting the hearing-impaired community to a larger extent.

A successful Hearing-Aid Fitting (HAF) is more than just selecting an appropriate Hearing Aid (HA) device for a patient with Hearing Loss (HL). The initial fitting is given by the prescription based on user’s hearing loss; however, it is often necessary for the audiologist to readjust some parameters to satisfy the user demands. Therefore, in this paper, we concentrated on a new application of Neural Network (NN) combined with a Transfer Learning (TL) strategy to develop a fitting algorithm with the prescription database for hearing loss and readjusted gain to minimize the gap between fitting satisfaction. As prior information, we generated the data set from two popular hearing-aid fitting software, then fed the training data to our proposed model, and verified the performance of the architecture. Pondering real life circumstances, where numerous fitting records may not always be accessible, we first investigated the number of minimum fitting records required for possible sufficient training. After that, we evaluated the performance of the proposed algorithm in two phases: (a) NN with refined hyper parameter showed enhanced performance in compare to state-of-the-art DNN approach, and (b) the TL approach boosted the performance of the NN algorithm in a broad way. Altogether, our model provides a pragmatic and promising tool for HAF.

Recent research has achieved a great classification rate for separating healthy people from those with Parkinson’s disease (PD) using speech and the voice. However, these studies have primarily treated early and advanced stages of PD as equal entities, neglecting the distinctive speech impairments and other symptoms that vary across the different stages of the disease. To address this limitation, and improve diagnostic precision, this study assesses the selected acoustic features of dysphonia, as they relate to PD and the Hoehn and Yahr stages, by combining various preprocessing techniques and multiple classification algorithms, to create a comprehensive and robust solution for classification tasks. The dysphonia features extracted from the three sustained Korean vowels /아/(a), /이/(i), and /우/(u) exhibit diversity and strong correlations. To address this issue, the analysis of variance F-Value feature selection classifier from scikit-learn was employed, to identify the topmost relevant features. Additionally, to overcome the class imbalance problem, the synthetic minority over-sampling technique was utilized. To ensure fair comparisons, and mitigate the influence of individual classifiers, four commonly used machine learning classifiers, namely random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbor (kNN), and multi-layer perceptron (MLP), were employed. This approach enables a comprehensive evaluation of the feature extraction methods, and minimizes the variance in the final classification models. The proposed hybrid machine learning pipeline using the acoustic features of sustained vowels efficiently detects the early and mid-advanced stages of PD with a detection accuracy of 95.48%, and with a detection accuracy of 86.62% for the 4-stage, and a detection accuracy of 89.48% for the 3-stage classification of PD. This study successfully demonstrates the significance of utilizing the diverse acoustic features of dysphonia in the classification of PD and its stages.

The automatic speech recognition (ASR) model usually requires a large amount of training data to provide better results compared with the ASR models trained with a small amount of training data. It is difficult to apply the ASR model to non-standard speech such as that of cochlear implant (CI) patients, owing to privacy concerns or difficulty of access. In this paper, an effective finetuning and augmentation ASR model is proposed. Experiments compare the character error rate (CER) after training the ASR model with the basic and the proposed method. The proposed method achieved a CER of 36.03% on the CI patient’s speech test dataset using only 2 h and 30 min of training data, which is a 62% improvement over the basic method.