[Source:  Medical News Today]
Computer engineers and hearing scientists at The Ohio State University have made a potential breakthrough in solving a 50-year-old problem in hearing technology: how to help the hearing-impaired understand speech in the midst of background noise.
In the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, they describe how they used the latest developments in neural networks to boost test subjects’ recognition of spoken words from as low as 10 percent to as high as 90 percent.
The researchers hope the technology will pave the way for next-generation digital hearing aids. Such hearing aids could even reside inside smartphones; the phones would do the computer processing, and broadcast the enhanced signal to ultra-small earpieces wirelessly.
Several patents are pending on the technology, and the researchers are working with leading hearing aid manufacturer Starkey, as well as others around the world to develop the technology.
Conquering background noise has been a “holy grail” in hearing technology for half a century, explained Eric Healy, professor of speech and hearing science and director of Ohio State’s Speech Psychoacoustics Laboratory.
Read the Rest of this Article on Medical News Today