These Hearing Aids Will Tune in to Your Brain
Summary
Tracking brain waves and eye signals could cut through the noise
Imagine you’re at a bustling dinner party filled with laughter, music, and clinking silverware. You’re trying to follow a conversation across the table, but every word feels like it’s wrapped in noise. For most people, these types of party scenarios, where it’s difficult to filter out extraneous sounds and focus on a single source, are an occasional annoyance. For millions with hearing loss, they’re a daily challenge—and not just in busy settings.
Today’s hearing aids aren’t great at determining which sounds to amplify and which to ignore, and this often leaves users overwhelmed and fatigued. Even the routine act of conversing with a loved one during a car ride can be mentally draining, simply because the hum of the engine and road noises are magnified to create loud and constant background static that blurs speech.
In recent years, modern hearing aids have made impressive strides. They can, for example, use a technology called adaptive beamforming to focus their microphones in the direction of a talker. Noise-reduction settings also help decrease background cacophony, and some devices even use machine-learning-based analysis, trained on uploaded data, to detect certain environments—for example a car or a party—and deploy custom settings.
That’s why I was initially surprised to find out that today’s state-of-the-art hearing aids aren’t good enough. “It’s like my ears work but my brain is tired,” I remember one elderly man complaining, frustrated with the inadequacy of his cutting-edge noise-suppression hearing aids. At the time, I was a graduate student at the University of Texas at Dallas, surveying individuals with hearing loss. The man’s insight led me to a realization: Mental strain is an unaddressed frontier of hearing technology.
Chrispin Mukuwa
Software Developer
Fullstack software developer
