Helping People Hear Better with “Smart” Hearing Devices

Millions of people around the world have difficulty hearing. Hearing aids and cochlear implants help people hear better, especially in quiet places. Unfortunately, these devices do not always help in noisy situations like busy classrooms or restaurants. This means that a person with hearing loss may struggle to follow a conversation with friends or family and may avoid going out. We used methods from the field of artificial intelligence to develop “smart” hearing aids and cochlear implants that can get rid of background noise. We play many different sounds into a computer program, which learns to pick out the speech sounds and filter out unwanted background noises. Once the computer program has been trained, it is then tested on new examples of noisy speech and can be incorporated into hearing aids or cochlear implants. These “smart” approaches can help people with hearing loss understand speech better in noisy situations.