Application US20190052978

METHOD FOR OPERATING A HEARING DEVICE AND HEARING DEVICE
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US20190052978

1. A method for operating a hearing device of a user, which comprises the steps of: (11) (4)

carrying out an electromyography step in which muscle activity of an auricular muscle of the user is measured using an electrode array;

continuously measuring the muscle activity to detect a complex activity profile of the auricular muscle in which an underlying intention of the user is coded;

generating, via the electrode array, a sensor signal that is classified by means of a classifier in which the muscle activity is decoded and the underlying intention is determined by examining whether the sensor signal has a previously known feature vector; and

assigning the previously known feature vector to an operating mode of the hearing device that is set if the sensor signal has the previously known feature vector.

2. The method according to claim 1, which further comprises measuring the muscle activity over a measurement period of at least 100 ms and that the previously known feature vector is searched for in the sensor signal over an entire measurement period. (0)

3. The method according to claim 1, which further comprises: (1) (2)

configuring the hearing device for directional hearing; and

adjusting a directivity of the hearing device on a basis of the muscle activity, and a sound source in a specific direction is emphasized.

4. The method according to claim 3, wherein the hearing device is a binaural hearing device and has two individual devices to be worn on different sides of a head of the user, and the sensor signal is generated on each of the different sides by means of the electrode array and the muscular activity of the auricular muscle is measured. (3) (0)

8. The method according to claim 1, wherein an own-voice situation, in which the user is speaking, is recognized based on the muscle activity, and the operating mode is an own-voice reduction in which a natural voice component is reduced in an output signal of the hearing device. (0)

9. The method according to claim 1, wherein a facial expression of the user is recognized on a basis of the muscle activity, and is used as a control command for setting a specific operating mode that is assigned to the control command. (0)

10. The method according to claim 1, wherein faulty positioning of the hearing device is recognized based on the muscle activity. (0)

11. The method according to claim 1, which further comprises setting an amplification scheme, a compression scheme or a noise suppression of the hearing device, based on the muscle activity. (0)

12. The method according to claim 1, wherein the previously known feature vector is stored in an external database. (0)

13. The method according to claim 1, which further comprises subjecting the sensor signal to feature extraction by means of a feature extractor, in which a new feature vector is generated which is stored as an additional previously known feature vector. (2) (0)

14. The method according to claim 13 which further comprises generating the new feature vector in a supervised machine learning process, wherein: (3) (5)

a particular operating mode is assigned to a particular situation;

the particular situation is generated as a current situation;

the feature extractor independently searches for a number of unknown features in the sensor signal;

the unknown features are combined to form the new feature vector; and

the new feature vector is assigned to the particular operating mode.

15. The method according to claim 14, which further comprises carrying out the supervised machine learning process during normal operation of the hearing device, with the feature extractor continuously examining whether the new feature vector is contained in the sensor signal. (0)

16. The method according to claim 14, wherein: (0) (2)

18. The method according to claim 14, which further comprises integrating the previously known feature vector into a neural network, by means of the neural network it is examined whether the sensor signal has the previously known feature vector, by determining a feature vector of the sensor signal and using it as an input signal for the neural network. (1) (0)

17. The method according to claim 13, which further comprises integrating the feature extractor and the classifier together into a signal processor, and the feature extraction and classification are treated as a single optimization problem. (0)

20. The method according to claim 1, which further comprises dividing the sensor signal into a plurality of frequency bands by a filter bank, with each frequency band forming a number of features. (2) (0)

23. The method according to claim 1, wherein the electrode array has at most five electrodes. (0)

24. The method according to claim 1, wherein the electrode array has a plurality of electrodes, one of the electrodes is a reference electrode, by means of which a reference signal is measured away from the auricular muscle of the user, and in that the sensor signal is prepared by means of the reference signal before the sensor signal is fed to the classifier. (0)

25. A hearing device, comprising: (0) (1)

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Application US20190052978

METHOD FOR OPERATING A HEARING DEVICE AND HEARING DEVICE

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