This project is concerned with the structured development of a new approach to the design and prescription of hearing aids within the European Community. These new instruments for hearing are based on the use of speech pattern-seeking algorithms which extract specially important speech components from the complete speech signal and which can operate in normal conditions of noise and reverberation. Field trials using wearable aids produced for the project are in progress in the Dutch, English, French and Swedish languages. Deafness is perhaps the most widespread single disability in Europe; it affects about 5% of the population. For the majority of these handicapped people, conventional amplifying hearing aids are of great value and are adequate to ensure integration within normal family and working life. However, some 160,000 adults within the Community as a whole are so profoundly hearing impaired that they are not able to make adequate use of amplifying aids. Here, the use of lip-reading presents the only real basis for interaction with the normally communicating world. The use of a structured approach to the implementation of the new speech pattern element aids makes it feasible to address the needs of these people by the clear auditory provision of those components of speech which are most needed to complement the visual information available from lip-reading. In our work, each patient is provided with a wearable speech pattern processing hearing aid which gives an output matched to the individual's hearing characteristics. Controlled assessments of the value of the approach compared with the use of conventional aids are based on the use of carefully designed, common standard, fitting, training and evaluation procedures in each of the four present language environments. This concerted activity can be briefly summarised:

• a basic set of speech pattern element priorities in the auditory supplementation of lipreading has been defined. Robust means of analysis have been developed and applied to the provision of these speech pattern elements; voice pitch/larynx frequency; loudness/intensity of the speech signal; frication/aperiodicity. The first work has been directed towards English but the special requirements of Dutch, French and Swedish can be catered for.

• a specially designed signal processing wearable hearing aid has been developed and made in first prototype quantities for the present four-country trials

• comprehensive common psycho-acoustic and speech assessment tools have been defined; standard cross comparable phonetic structures and evaluation and training methods are in use for all four languages