{"id":22648,"date":"2017-11-13T11:07:53","date_gmt":"2017-11-13T16:07:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/?p=22648"},"modified":"2021-05-21T11:58:29","modified_gmt":"2021-05-21T15:58:29","slug":"msu-technology-hearing-aid-noise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/msu-technology-hearing-aid-noise\/","title":{"rendered":"No More Need to Turn Off Hearing Aid to Tune Out Background Noise with MSU\u2019s New Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

A team of researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) is <\/span>developing a revolutionary hearing aid technology<\/span><\/a> that would eliminate background noise heard through devices currently used by people who have need of a hearing aid.<\/span><\/p>\n

While hearable technologies have improved many people\u2019s ability to hear, there are some situations where the devices have been proven inefficient. <\/span><\/p>\n

Hearing aids commonly work as an amplifier, so they pick up all the noise in a room. This makes it very hard for people wearing hearing aids to hear individual voices and follow a conversation while in a crowded restaurant or venue. Turning up the volume in a hearing aid only amplifies the background noise. <\/span><\/p>\n

The National Institute of Health<\/span><\/a> estimates that nearly 29 million adults in America could benefit from hearing aids. Additional <\/span>research<\/span><\/a> shows that 80 percent of those who could benefit from hearable aid devices choose not to use them. Difficulty hearing in noisy situations has been proven as one of the reasons adults choose not to wear them. <\/span><\/p>\n

In an effort to remedy this issue, MSU assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering <\/span>Mi Zhang<\/span><\/a> and his team are developing a smart hearing device that can differentiate and amplify noise from conversation while dampening background noise. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis smart hearing aid device could filter out the noises the user does not want to hear in a noisy environment, and enhance the clarity of the sounds the user is interested in listening to,\u201d Zhang said. <\/span><\/p>\n

Zhang\u2019s team includes doctoral student and lead researcher Xiao Zeng, research associate Kai Cao, and undergraduate student Haochen Sun. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe biggest challenge is filtering the sound quickly, in real-time,\u201d Zeng said in a statement. \u201cThat means processing sound very fast, in about 10 milliseconds. Otherwise, sound and moving lips don\u2019t synch and it tends to cause dizziness or drowsiness of hearing aid users.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHuman voices are very close, complicating our task,\u201d Cao said in a statement. \u201cWe are having success with a machine learning-based approach and are hoping to work out the subtle frequency differences. If we can do that, your cell phone should also be able to enhance voices and mitigate the other noises.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

For the next step, the team is working on developing a miniaturized version of the hearing aid device so it fits comfortably inside the ear, Zhang said. <\/span><\/p>\n

The team believes it can deliver the first prototype very soon. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe plan to releases our first version around May 2018,\u201d Zhang said \u201cThe biggest challenge is the battery life of the device. We aim at 8 hours continuous use with a single charge.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The team\u2019s goal to create a smart hearing aid device was inspired by the 2017 National Science Foundation\u2019s Hearables Challenge, which took place in May. The challenge awarded cash prizes to teams that could come up with solutions, \u201csuch as algorithms or methods, that could improve the clarity of conversation in noisy environments.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The team won third place in the challenge and presented its plans at the 2017 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Ubicomp conference recently in Maui, Hawaii.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A team of researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) is developing a revolutionary hearing aid technology that would eliminate background noise heard through devices currently used by people who have need of a hearing aid. While hearable technologies have improved many people\u2019s ability to hear, there are some situations where the devices have been proven […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":22646,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[626,232,241,377,229,243],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-technology","category-medical-breakthrough","category-michigan-state-university","category-lead-stories","category-health"],"aioseo_notices":[],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/Michigan-State-University-College-of-Engineering.jpg",830,533,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/Michigan-State-University-College-of-Engineering-224x144.jpg",224,144,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/Michigan-State-University-College-of-Engineering-300x193.jpg",300,193,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/Michigan-State-University-College-of-Engineering.jpg",830,533,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/Michigan-State-University-College-of-Engineering.jpg",830,533,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/Michigan-State-University-College-of-Engineering.jpg",830,533,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/Michigan-State-University-College-of-Engineering.jpg",830,533,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"Jackson Schroeder","author_link":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/author\/jackson-schroeder\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"A team of researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) is developing a revolutionary hearing aid technology that would eliminate background noise heard through devices currently used by people who have need of a hearing aid. While hearable technologies have improved many people\u2019s ability to hear, there are some situations where the devices have been proven…","featured_media_src_url":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/Michigan-State-University-College-of-Engineering.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22648\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tun.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}