Abstract: India has a substantial number of hearing impaired persons, especially in the rural sector. It is estimated that as many as 50% of inner city children under the age of seven have transient hearing loss of up to 10%, recurrent or persistent enough to affect their educational and social progress. The number of hearing impaired persons per lakh of population in rural sector is 600 for males and 500 for females. Conventional analog hearing aids presently have a number of functional deficiencies. These include fixed frequency and I/O response, lack of flexibility, inability to distinguish speech from noise, etc. These problems can be solved by developing effective speech processing algorithm for hearing aids. This paper is focused on types of hearing impairment and role of inner ear hearing impairment in maximizing the audibility of impaired peoples.

Keywords: Hearing Impaired; Speech processing algorithm; inner ear hearing impairment; Audibility.