First steps towards solving the café problem

Abstract

Hearing loss, and assistive technologies to compensate for the loss, are becoming more and more regular. Hearing aids have improved the quality of life for many suffering from hearing loss but are still insufficient in some social settings. The café problem rises when there are a group of people talking in a relatively noisy environment where one person has hearing aids. Even with modern advancements, such as speech recognition and noise cancellation, people using hearing aids have difficulties differentiating the group's conversation from other noises.

This thesis will provide the architecture, design, implementation and evaluation of a mobile application as a first step in creating a system that can counter this café problem. A critical factor in a system like this is to reduce the audio latency to a minimum. We investigate where latency is introduced in the system by creating an experimental setup and evaluating the system.

We implement a prototype system and use the experimental setup to identify latency-inducing components. We discuss how this latency can be reduced and bring forward future steps that must be made in completing the system.