A microphone assembly includes a housing including a sound port and an external-device interface having a plurality of electrical contacts. An acoustic transducer, such as a MEMS microphone, is disposed in the housing and is in acoustic communication with the sound port. An electrical circuit is disposed in the housing that is electrically coupled to the acoustic transducer and to electrical contacts on the external-device interface. A magnetic transducer including an electrical coil disposed about a core, such as a telecoil or charging coil configuration, is fastened to the housing. The electrical coil having leads, at least one of the leads electrically terminated at a coil contact of the housing.

In a method for operating a binaural hearing system having a first hearing aid and a second hearing, the first hearing aid generates a first reference signal from a sound signal by a first reference microphone and the second hearing aid generates a second reference signal from the sound signal by a second reference microphone. The first reference signal and the second reference signal are both used to derive a first binaural beamformer signal. For at least a number of frequency bands, the first reference signal is used to derive a first phase. For the number of frequency bands, a first output signal is derived from the first binaural beamformer signal and the first phase.

A hearing system includes a pair of first and second hearing devices wirelessly coupled to a remote device that includes a microphone. One or more gains can each be calculated as a function of a first microphone signal received from the first hearing device, a second microphone signal received from the second hearing device, and a remote microphone signal received from the remote device. The function can be designed to improve speech intelligibility in a noisy environment. The one or more gains are applied to the first and second microphone signals to produce output sounds by the first and second hearing devices.

An improved implantable auditory stimulation system includes two or more implanted microphones for transcutaneous detection of acoustic signals. Each of the implanted microphones provides an output signal. The microphone output signals may be combinatively utilized by an implanted processor to generate a signal for driving an implanted auditory stimulation device. The implanted microphones may be located at offset subcutaneous locations and/or may be provided with different design sensitivities, wherein combinative processing of the microphone output signals may yield an improved drive signal. In one embodiment, the microphone signal may be processed for beamforming and/or directionality purposes.

An audio streaming device for streaming an audio signal to at least one hearing assistive device (32). The audio streaming device comprises at least one input transducer (21), an electronic sensor device (28) adapted for sensing gravitational forces acting on the audio streaming device (20), and a transmitter (30) adapted for streaming audio from the at least one input transducer (21) to the at least one hearing assistive device (32). The audio streaming device (20) further comprises a shock protection unit (31) adapted for comparing an output signal from the electronic sensor device (28) to a first threshold value, and ceasing streaming by the transmitter (30) of the audio stream from the at least one input transducer (21), when the output signal from the electronic sensor device (28) exceeds the first threshold value.

A hearing device includes a) a multitude of input transducers providing a corresponding multitude of electric input signals; and b) a processor for providing a processed signal in dependence of the electric input signals. The processor includes b1) a beamformer for providing a spatially filtered signal in dependence of electric input signals and beamformer filter coefficients determined in dependence of a fixed steering vector including as elements respective acoustic transfer functions from a target signal source, to each of said multitude of input transducers; and b2) a target adaptation module connected to the input transducers and to at least one beamformer, the target adaptation module being configured to provide compensation signals to compensate the electric input signals so that they match the fixed steering vector.

Embodiments of systems and methods are described for determining which of a plurality of beamformed audio signals to select for signal processing. In some embodiments, a plurality of audio input signals are received from a microphone array comprising a plurality of microphones. A plurality of beamformed audio signals are determined based on the plurality of input audio signals, the beamformed audio signals comprising a direction. A plurality of signal features may be determined for each beamformed audio signal. Smoothed features may be determined for each beamformed audio signal based on at least a portion of the plurality of signal features. The beamformed audio signal corresponding to the maximum smoothed feature may be selected for further processing.

A hearing aid comprises a resulting beam former (Y) for providing a resulting beamformed signal Y.sub.BF based on first and second electric input signals IN.sub.1 and IN.sub.2, first and second sets of complex frequency dependent weighting parameters W.sub.11(k), W.sub.12(k) and W.sub.21(k), W.sub.22(k), and a resulting complex, frequency dependent adaptation parameter β(k)•β(k) may be determined as <C.sub.2*•C.sub.1>/<(|C2|.sup.2>+c), where * denotes the complex conjugation and • denotes the statistical expectation operator, and c is a constant, and wherein said adaptive beam former filtering unit (BFU) comprises a smoothing unit for implementing said statistical expectation operator by smoothing the complex expression C.sub.2*•C.sub.1 and the real expression |C.sub.2>.sup.2 over time. Alternatively, β(k) may be determined from the following expression

[00001]$\beta =\frac{w_{C.Math..Math.1}^H.Math.C_v.Math.w_{C.Math..Math.2}}{w_{C.Math..Math.2}^H.Math.C_v.Math.w_{C.Math..Math.2}},$

where w.sub.C1 and w.sub.C2 are the beamformer weights representing the first (C.sub.1) and the second (C.sub.2) beamformers, respectively, C.sub.v is a noise covariance matrix, and H denotes Hermitian transposition. Corresponding methods of operating a hearing aid, and a hearing aid utilizing smoothing β(k) based on adaptive covariance smoothing are disclosed.

A hearing device includes: an input module for provision of a first input signal; a processor configured to provide an electrical output signal based on the first input signal; a receiver configured to provide an audio output signal; and a controller comprising a speech intelligibility estimator configured to determine a speech intelligibility indicator indicative of speech intelligibility based on the first input signal, wherein the controller is configured to control the processor based on the speech intelligibility indicator; wherein the speech intelligibility estimator comprises a decomposition module configured to decompose the first input signal into a first representation of the first input signal in a frequency domain, wherein the first representation comprises one or more elements representative of the first input signal; and wherein the decomposition module comprises one or more characterization blocks for characterizing the one or more elements of the first representation in the frequency domain.

A partner microphone unit comprising a) a multitude microphones for picking up a sound from the environment providing corresponding electric input signals, each comprising a target signal component and a noise signal component; b) a multi-input unit noise reduction system for providing an estimate Ŝ of the target sound s comprising the person's voice and comprising a multi-input beamformer filtering unit coupled to said input units and configured to determine filter weights for providing a beamformed signal, wherein signal components from other directions than a direction of the target signal source are attenuated, whereas signal components from the direction of the target signal source are left un-attenuated; c) antenna and transceiver circuitry for establishing an audio link to another device; and wherein the multi-input beamformer filtering unit comprises an adaptive beamformer is provided.