With the support of a $522,000 two year grant from NIH, a University of Texas Dallas (UT Dallas) www.utdallas.edu team is working to harness the power of smartphones to help improve the quality of life for people who wear Hearing Assistive Devices (HAD). These devices include hearing aids, cochlear implants, and personal sound amplifiers.
“Current hearing assistive devices are able to fit inside or behind the ear, but these devices come with small, not very powerful processors in order to keep the device small, low power, and low cost,” reports Dr. Issa Panahi, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science http://ecs.utdallas.edu and Principal Investigator for the research.
According to Dr. Panahi, “Smartphones used by billions have very powerful processors and other features such as large memories, microphones, speakers, wireless technology and long lasting batteries that could help HAD wearers.”
The research team at UT Dallas reports that HAD algorithms can differentiate between a limited number of noises and so more sophisticated algorithms are needed to cover more types of background noise signals.
Researchers are especially interested in the automatic classification of various background noise signals and enhancement of both the quality and intelligibility of speech signals in noisy environments and crowded places.
As Dr. Panahi explains, “Current hearing aids don’t enhance speech signals optimally in an automatic manner. The success of this project will open the door to the development of a wide collection of smartphone apps to be used in conjunction with hearing aid devices.”
In another state, the Robert G. Sanderson Community Center of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing http://deafservices.utah.gov located in Taylorsville, Utah is on the lookout for new technology.
The technology at the Center includes videophones, apps for smartphones for captioned movies, relay services, computer access real-time translation, UbiDuo devices and various types of assistive listening devices.
The Center has a built-in induction loop system at several locations to help people who are hard of hearing. This loop system simply means that wiring has been installed around the outer edges of the classrooms underneath the carpet to allow individuals with t-coil capabilities to turn on the t-coil in their cochlear implants or hearing aids and hear the sound directly without having to use headphones or neck loops.
The speakers in the room use a microphone and the sound is transmitted from the microphone directly into their hearing aid or cochlear implant. The wireless transmission eliminates background noise that sometimes interferes at a meeting or in a public place.