Flexible pseudorandom number generator for tinnitus treatment implemented on a dsPIC

Abstract

Treatment of tinnitus with masking sounds has reach a significant developed in recent years. It is mainly because it has been possible to implement noise sinthesizers based on random number generators in digital signal processors (DSP), which form a part of almost any digital hearing aid device. One limitation of these methods is that limitations of the DSP architecture prevent pseudo white noise of being generated conform to a real white noise statistics. In this paper, a technique to generate adittive white gaussian noise (AWGN) or noise with uniform distribution using coefficients stored in memory of the DSP program is proposed. An implementation of the technique is carried out on a dsPIC from Microchip and subjective experiments and experimental measurements are performed to validate the performance of the developed technique.