An intelligent hearing aid capable of understanding its wearer’s intention has been developed by Columbia University. The smart device promises to make difficult communication situations more accessible for people who are hard of hearing.
How? The self-contained device processes the incoming signal using artificial intelligence, which reportedly makes it capable of isolating the information the wearer wants from the various background noises.
An intelligent hearing aid capable of understanding your intentions
Cognitive hearing aid: an unprecedented solution
Background music, clattering cutlery, laughter and lively conversations: following a conversation in a noisy environment can sometimes be difficult. To do it, you have to maintain a sustained level of concentration in order to focus solely on the source that interests you, comparing what you hear with what you want to listen to.
This is the principle Professor Nima Mesgarani and a team of researchers at Columbia University worked on, looking for an accessibility solution for people with hearing impairments. The project, called the cognitive hearing aid, aims to offer an unprecedented solution on the hearing-aid market.
Some devices already on the market can “remove” the background noise in a conversation (noise cancelling), but none is capable of amplifying one single voice.
Signal processing based on a neural network
The intelligent hearing aid, described in more technical detail in the Journal of Neural Engineering, is in fact an artificial intelligence implanted directly in the wearer’s ear. How does it work?
- First, the device takes in the overall communication picture and identifies the various sound sources thanks to several artificial-intelligence algorithms that analyse the signal from each source.
- Once the nature of the sources has been identified, the picture is cleaned up and “background” noise removed. All that remains is the various speakers in the conversation.
- Finally, the device detects the speaker the wearer wants to communicate with, and raises the volume of that person alone.
Where the cognitive hearing aid really stands out is in interpreting the intention of the person using it, by studying the neural activity of their auditory cortex. The cognitive hearing aid can judge which speaker its wearer wants to communicate with, based on intention-decoding methods (Auditory Attention Detection – AAD). On top of this interpretation, the artificial neural network ranks the speakers’ voices in order of proximity and then amplifies them according to that ranking. As a result, the wearer of the intelligent aid does not have to make a request or operate the device at all! It is reportedly able to adjust the volume of the conversation autonomously and very naturally. And all of that in less than ten seconds!
Smart Ear: another technology working towards accessibility for the hard of hearing
Presented at the last CES in 2018, this young French start-up has developed a connected device that helps people with hearing impairments in everyday life by emitting coloured flashes. The solution consists of a unit that can recognise up to 30 different sounds, together with a dedicated app for controlling the device from a smartphone. That way, to know whether someone is knocking at your door, whether your smoke detector is going off or even whether your oven timer has finished, all you have to do is look at the unit, which emits colour-coded warnings ranging from red for the most important alarms to blue for everyday ones. Of course, each alarm can be configured individually, so you can customise the colour of each event. And so that you can be alerted from anywhere, the connected device can also notify you via push notifications on your smartphone. A home-automation solution working towards accessibility thanks to the IoT and connected objects.
From artificial intelligence to augmented intelligence
Ultimately, can we really consider these forms of machine cognition to be artificial intelligence? In our first example, even though the machine makes a difficult situation accessible for the person using it, it is that person’s own intelligence that is being augmented. Yes, AI is placed at the service of people and allows them to enhance their capabilities in order to overcome a disability — but free will is left to the human being. That is why it would be preferable to talk about “augmented intelligence” rather than “artificial intelligence”, because in this case the machine could serve no purpose without the intervention of the human brain.
