New Hearing Device Isolates Voices

An experimental hearing aid differentiates speakers and monitors the wearer’s brain activity to amplify the one she is trying to listen to.

Written byJef Akst

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Having a conversation in a loud room can be challenging, especially for those who wear hearing aids, which indiscriminately amplify voices. A new type of hearing aid, described yesterday (May 15) in Science Advances, could be the solution, by isolating individual speakers and using the brain activity of the wearer to selectively amplify the one voice he or she is trying to listen to.

The device, developed by Columbia University’s Nima Mesgarani and colleagues, is an upgrade from a system the team created in 2017, which had been pretrained to recognize individual voices. The latest version can now separate voices that it has never encountered before, The Guardian reports.

Currently, the device relies on electrodes implanted in the brain. The researchers tested it on three epilepsy patients who already had such electrode implants, playing audio recordings of multiple speakers while monitoring neural activity in the auditory ...

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Meet the Author

Jef Akst
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Jef (an unusual nickname for Jennifer) got her master’s degree from Indiana University in April 2009 studying the mating behavior of seahorses. After four years of diving off the Gulf Coast of Tampa and performing behavioral experiments at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, she left research to pursue a career in science writing. As The Scientist's managing editor, Jef edited features and oversaw the production of the TS Digest and quarterly print magazine. In 2022, her feature on uterus transplantation earned first place in the trade category of the Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. She is a member of the National Association of Science Writers.
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