Delay-constrained hearing aid speech enhancement using a wireless remote microphone

Hearing aids have been shown in literature to offer better noise reduction and spatial cue preservation when used alongside a remote microphone. Oftentimes, this is in ideal conditions where both devices are synchronized and can transmit data losslessly and instantaneously. In practice, hearing aids tend to receive remote microphone data via wireless link, which incurs a slew of adverse effects. Among these, transmission delay is of particular importance, as hearing aids already have tight constraints on allowable end-to-end delay. Typically, this delay constraint is under 10 ms for perceptual reasons. In this work, we study a filter designed for hearing aids with a network-delayed remote microphone. Originally, the filter is derived and analyzed in the time frequency domain without explicit consideration of the delay constraints. We rederive the filter to address this gap, and seek to measure the effect of the network delay and delay constraints on overall performance.