A highly directional hearing aid has been developed with the aim to give a much higher speech intelligibility than with conventional hearing aids. The high directivity is obtained by mounting four microphones in each temple of a pair of glasses and performing optimized beam forming. This leads to an averaged directivity index of 9 dB under free field conditions, without head disturbance. In a recent research program the directivity of this device has been measured with different directivity settings, under free field and diffuse field conditions, with and without head diffraction. Results are presented of this research, where also a comparison is made with the directivity of a conventional hearing aid. Also the influence of the setting of the superdirective beamforming on the noise sensitivity is shown, indicating that for practical use the directivity should be limited.
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