Proposal of hearing aid system for unilateral deafness patients

The unilateral deafness patients lost hearing in one ears, they lost the ability for identification of sound source direction. Furthermore, when the cause for the deafness is perceptiveness, the patients can´t be treated by the standard hearing aid, and they pose the problems for their daily living, for example, communication with other people, detection of the danger. Therefore, we aimed to develop the new type hearing aid system with a function of a sound source direction indicator. Our proposed hearing aid system has a vibrator, and this system estimates the direction of the sound source and present the direction by the vibrator. In this report, we propose the basic principle of new type hearing aid system and its structure, furthermore, it is reported that the result of trial production.