Hearing deficiencies are strongly connected to the demographic changes in the European Union. The sense of hearing begins to degrade from the age of 40 onwards and estimates indicate that more than 50% of people over the age of 60 have some degree of hearing loss.

The demographic changes and age related hearing losses will result in an increasing number of hearing-impaired people in the European Union. Estimates of the numbers of persons in the E.U. with various hearing disabilities in the early 1990s report a figure of 6% of hard of hearing and 0.1% of deaf people. Professor Adrian Davis, from the Institute of Hearing Research (IHR) in the U.K., estimates that 81,536,000 adults will suffer hearing loss in Europe as a whole by 2005. By 2015, the figure will be 90,588,000. This figure indicates that more than 14% of adults in Europe will have hearing problems. With regard to children, the IHR estimates that there are 174,000 children in Europe as a whole, with severe hearing loss and another 600,000 with mild hearing loss. These statistics make the hearing disabled population one of the largest minorities facing the challenge that communication is mainly audio-based.

In Europe between the 1970s and today, the previously known as “industrial society” changed to be known as the “information society.” Also referred to as the “knowledge society”, the latter term focuses more on freely available information for every citizen. This focus has been corrected to describe the flow of knowledge instead by using the term “communication society.” Even though the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) allows visual communication in form of letters, faxes, SMS (short message service) and emails, the main and especially spontaneous form of information exchange between individuals is still audio-based: TV, radio, telephone/cell-phone, and personal conversation. Hearing aids are supposed to support the hearing-impaired but the acceptance and use of such devices is influenced as much by psycho-social factors as by the performance of the hearing aid itself.

Apart from the hearing-impaired who satisfactorily benefit from supportive devices, two additional, sizeable groups can be identified:

• potential users who do not own a hearing device
• users who own a hearing device, but do not use it

Statistics show that, on average, persons with hearing deficiencies tend to wait seven years before searching for assistance, and 75 % of the hearing-impaired who could benefit from a hearing aid do not own one. The remaining 25% of users who already own an ALD do not necessarily use it. Users regularly complain that hearing aids are “fragile devices that often do not work properly.” These complaints are due to several reasons: 1) Hearing aids need to be fitted. Fitting is the process of parameterizing a hearing aid to “fit” a single end-user′s personal needs for his unique hearing disability. 2) The fitting process usually does not deliver immediate satisfactory results, thus requiring several visits to the hearing aid dispenser for readjustments. Depending on the circumstances (severeness of hearing disability, quality of hearing aid, expertise of hearing aid dispenser, user′s willingness to cooperate, distance to travel, etc.) a user may arrive to the premature conclusion that the device is useless or faulty by design. 3) Furthermore, the ear is a relatively harsh environment for the miniaturized piece of electronics. For example, the auditory canal′s cerumen can clog up the tiny microphones of the hearing device. It is not uncommon that hearing aid devices have to be sent in for repairs for this and similar reasons. Eventually some users become frustrated with the process and consequently stop using the hearing aid. The expensive hearing device may then remain unused in a bedroom drawer and rendered useless.

The HaH project wants to “hide” hearing support functionality within a common digital TV/STB-like Home Information and Communication (HIC) platform. This way, the acceptance barrier is lowered to a minimum. At the same time, the available TV screen can be used to raise intelligibility through visual support. Pure audio signals (e.g., telephone conversations) do not deliver extra visual information that makes, for example, lip-reading possible. Even video streams do not provide this support in general.

Some additional examples include:

• A news documentation where a narrator (typical background voice-over) comments on a scene that is shown. The speaker himself and his face can not be seen and therefore the hard of hearing cannot be supported by such visual support.
• Europe is polyglot and TV programs are often produced in a different language from the country where it has been broadcasted from. In this case, the audio stream is often dubbed to the native tongue. The facial expressions of the actors, however, remain unchanged and offer no support.
• Scenarios where there is more than one speaker at a time (e.g., dispute in TV talk-show) or when other loud, competing background sound sources are present (e.g. explosions in TV action movies).

These scenarios are currently not being covered by the Synface technology. Ways of detecting such scenarios and portraying these on the Synface interface are also investigated within the HaH project.

• Next to direct communication, home event detection is audio based, too. For example, a ringing doorbell or a finishing alarm of a microwave oven or a washing machine are events of this kind. Quite often high-pitched beeping signals are often missed by the elderly. This is a consequence rooted in the fact that hearing begins to degrade from the high-frequency spectrum downwards from the age of about 40.

The HaH project will address these special needs of persons having hearing disabilities including mainly the elderly by developing and integrating the aforementioned HIC platform. This ICT device shall be designed so as to have a very low acceptance barrier. The final integrated system shall provide powerful supportive audio signal processing (SASP) technologies together with a visual lip-reading support and easy fitting possibilities for the individual end-user. Thus, the HaH project will empower hearing disabled citizens by providing access to home information, home entertainment, home automation, home care, and personal communication and therefore will extend the time during which hearing impaired persons, especially the elderly, can communicate and live independently in their preferred environments.