LE Audio Applications Hearing Aids

Not long ago, Bluetooth technology only supported audio peer-to-peer communication. But LE Audio adds broadcast audio capabilities, helping Bluetooth technology break through this limitation. This new feature enables audio source devices to stream audio to an unlimited number of nearby Bluetooth audio sinks.

nRF5340 Bluetooth 5.3 Module Matter & LE Audio FSC-BT631D

Bluetooth audio broadcasting is both open and closed, allowing any receiving device within the range to participate, or only allowing the receiving device with the correct password to participate. The advent of broadcast audio has brought important new opportunities for technological innovation, including a powerful new feature - the birth of Auracast™ broadcast audio. 

With LE Audio, users can share music from their smartphones to multiple Bluetooth speakers or headphones for friends and family to enjoy.

Thanks to location-based Audio sharing, LE Audio also enables group visitors to share Bluetooth audio simultaneously in public places such as museums and art galleries to enhance the group visiting experience.

LC3 is a new generation of high-efficiency Bluetooth Audio codecs available in LE Audio profiles. It is capable of encoding speech and music at multiple-bit rates and can be added to any Bluetooth audio profile. Compared to Classic Audio's SBC, AAC, and aptX codecs, LC3 is based on perceptual coding techniques, particularly low-delay discrete cosine transform, time-domain noise shaping, frequency-domain noise shaping, and long-term post-filters, which greatly enhance sound quality, even at 50% bit-rate reductions. The low complexity of the LC3 codec, along with its low frame duration, enables lower Bluetooth transmission latency, providing users with a better wireless experience.

The development of LE Audio began with hearing aid applications.

The basic function of hearing aid products is to continuously pick up environmental sound through the microphone, and restore environmental sound in the wearer's ear after sound signal amplification and noise processing to achieve auxiliary hearing. Therefore, hearing AIDS does not necessarily have the function of wireless audio transmission in terms of assisting hearing and helping to realize daily communication between people.

However, with the development of The Times, digital audio applications based on electronic products are becoming more and more common and penetrating into People's Daily lives and work, among which the most typical ones are mobile phone streaming media and mobile phone calls. Implementing the wireless audio transmission function in hearing aid products has become an urgent need and the reality that smartphones 100% support Bluetooth makes it the only choice for a hearing aid to realize wireless audio transmission based on Bluetooth.

Devices adopting LE Audio technology can replace expensive and bulky hearing AIDS, allowing more places to provide audio services to people wearing hearing AIDS. The technology is expected to encourage device manufacturers to develop Bluetooth hearing AIDS that can be connected to mobile phones and televisions, making it easier for people with hearing impairment to use such devices, thereby revolutionizing the user experience of hearing devices in all aspects.

It supports BLE5.3+BR/EDR and enables a source device to broadcast the audio from the source to an unlimited number of Bluetooth audio sink devices synchronously. If you are interested in getting more information and details, please don’t hesitate to contact FEASYCOM.