A Low-Cost Hearing Aid powered by Neuro-Adaptive System Integrating EEG-Driven Attention Detection with AI Beamforming to Improve Speech Clarity in Noisy Environments

Abstract

Conventional hearing aids and acoustic beamforming systems cannot determine which speaker a listener is cognitively focused on in multi-speaker environments, often resulting in amplification of unwanted background noise. This research investigates whether EEG-based auditory attention decoding combined with real-time SRP-PHAT and MVDR beamforming can accurately identify a listener’s directional attention and increase signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) compared to traditional amplification methods. System performance was evaluated using directional classification accuracy, SNR improvement, and end-to-end latency measurements collected during controlled auditory attention experiments...