Design and Evaluation Challenges of Conversational Agents in Health Care and Well-being: Selective Review Study.

Background: Health care and well-being are 2 main interconnected application areas of conversational agents (CAs). There is a significant increase in research, development, and commercial implementations in this area. In parallel to the increasing interest, new challenges in designing and evaluating CAs have emerged.

Open Speech Platform: Democratizing Hearing Aid Research.

Hearing aids help overcome the challenges associated with hearing loss, and thus greatly benefit and improve the lives of those living with hearing-impairment. Unfortunately, there is a lack of adoption of hearing aids among those that can benefit from hearing aids. Hearing researchers and audiologists are trying to address this problem through their research.

A Wearable Platform for Research in Augmented Hearing.

We have previously reported a realtime, open-source speech-processing platform (OSP) for hearing aids (HAs) research. In this contribution, we describe a wearable version of this platform to facilitate audiological studies in the lab and in the field. The system is based on smartphone chipsets to leverage power efficiency in terms of FLOPS/watt and economies of scale.

A Wearable, Extensible, Open-Source Platform for Hearing Healthcare Research.

Hearing loss is one of the most common conditions affecting older adults worldwide. Frequent complaints from the users of modern hearing aids include poor speech intelligibility in noisy environments and high cost, among other issues. However, the signal processing and audiological research needed to address these problems has long been hampered by proprietary development systems, underpowered embedded processors, and the difficulty of performing tests in real-world acoustical environments.