Remix.run Logo
adinisom 9 hours ago

Hearing in noise is both what most people want from hearing aids and what they are least equipped to provide.

The traditional solution is an FM system where you give the person speaking a microphone linked to your hearing aids. There are dedicated ones like Phonak Roger. You could probably also use your phone as a microphone if it's bluetooth connected to your headphones or hearing aids.

mapt 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That sounds awkward.

The tech for isolating a speaker at conversational distances exists. You use half a dozen microphone transducers (minimum; Crappy microphone transducers are cheap and quality is expensive, so just use a bunch of them), and through a combination of phase and intensity they decode relative location, and amplify that phase expectation while suppressing everything that isn't phased like that. Sound is slow, and readily susceptible to real-time triangulation. The math/processing is much easier if the parallaxes are fixed (eg the microphones are arranged in a line array on the top band of a rigid pair of smart glasses), but with a little latency it's not prohibitive for a deformable array to solve for its own relative position as well.

392 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Least equipped to provide? They've been working on machine learning algos for exactly this purpose for twenty years.

Semaphor 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s more a solution for far more extreme cases, including actual hearing loss. This would be far more involved than me lining up my ears with their mouth ;)