Currently available hearing aids can efficiently reduce the background noise; however, they cannot help a user to listen to a single conversation at a noisy place because they do not know which speaker to focus on. A cognitive hearing aid which can constantly monitor the brain activity of the user to determine whether he/she is conversing with a specific speaker in the environment would be extremely beneficial. People with normal hearing ability can easily attend to a single speaker in a group of many. They can also easily switch their attention from one speaker to another.
However, people with hearing impairments find this extremely difficult. This contributes to increase in listening effort and a dependence on higher-level compensatory cognitive processes. State-of-the-art hearing devices efficiently suppress certain types of background noise, but they cannot help a user in this…
