The Design and Construction of Hearing Aid Device

Hearing aid device is a small electronic gadget that is fit in or behind the ear to improve one’s hearing and consequently communication ability. This research work involves the design and development of a hearing aid device with pre-amplifier; an acoustic signal picked-up using a condenser microphone. TDA 2822M IC is configured to produce an audio amplification which is converted to audio signal through a headphone. Designed equations were employed to calculate the physical parameters of the circuit. After the design, the circuit was constructed and tested on 4 people with partial hearing problem. The result showed that there was a significant improvement in the hearing ability of all the patients tested. The final test showed that the device could prove very useful for people with partial hearing problems. However, the device had no impact on persons suffering from complete deafness. For further improvement, it is recommended that a wireless hearing aid device should be designed and constructed to reduce the weight. The casing of the hearing aid should be made up of more portable, qualitative and lighter plastic material so as to reduce the overall weight and size. During the design, more care should be taken so as to avoid feedback signal between the microphone and the headphone which may result in noisy signal.