Bluetooth remote mic

[GeraG]

Hello,

With newer hearing aids such as Oticon Opn supporting bluetooth connectivity, can this be used to develop a remote mic or interconnected table mic's for meetings similar to Phonak's Roger Mics or Oticon ConnectClip? This mic would stream audio to the bluetooth hearing aids.

This would greatly help with understanding speech in noise, in meetings, and understanding speech from distance lecturers.

Thanks!

[m-r-s]

Hi!

No, probably not (easily).

The hardware components might be suited for that purpose, but the software is not.
However, even the hardware components are not optimal for that purpose (e.g., the in-ear mics).
In addition, I don't know which protocol the commercial devices use and if they accept to connections from third party equipment.

The proposed setup provides a functional prototype of a hearing aid with as least proprietary bits as possible in order to allow you to do anything you like with it.

Best wishes,
Marc

[GeraG]

From what I gather, bluetooth hearing aids can connect to third party devices which support BLE, such as iPhones. Thus, I think it should be possible to pair it to a bluetooth module without worrying about proprietary protocols?

This way a bluetooth microphone can pipe audio to the bluetooth hearing aids. There is more processing that may need to be involved, so perhaps a bluetooth linux-based system + microphone setup would be best for research purposes. An open source project such as this will allow us to do research on the use of multiple remote mics and remote mic algorithms.

What do you think? Perhaps I should discuss this project at openMHA.

[m-r-s]

Maybe that would be possible, but its not the focus of this project to extend functionality of commercial devices, because then you depend on their signal processing.

The proposed setup is not thought to be a product but a starting point for researchers and the curious.
From a scientific perspective, I would recommend to try meshing some raspberries with mics with the prototype via WiFi (e.g. using [1]) and then try to make the best of the available signals.

[1] https://www.open-mesh.org/projects/open-mesh/wiki