ABOVE: © ISTOCK.COM, RAWPIXEL
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 ...
