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Our electronic devices, be they computers, phones, thermostats, etc. are circuit boards of various sizes all controlling input and output information through the brain of the circuit or the microprocessor chip.
Since the 1980s these chips keep getting smaller and smaller yet able to handle or process unbelievable thousands of signals or commands instantly. These devices all have some space in modules that clip or are soldered into the circuit board for the software that runs everything and some storage of information the device needs to remember, called memory data.
Small devices like hearing aids have chips that are about an 1/8th of the size of a postage stamp yet able to now do amazing things. This article is being written to share with you some of the tremendous things hearing aids can do beyond the mere amplification of sound. Some of these features are found in different products. My articles are designed to be educational and not sales related so I will not be mentioning the brands, just a few of the modern capabilities that are in the market place now.
In the last two years, development has arrived using something called deep neural networking in the miniature micro processing chip. Deep neural networking, or DNN, is a type of machine learning that mimics the way the brain learns. It's been used for a variety of tasks; some that you might be familiar with, like language translation and image search tools, and some that you might not know about, like medical diagnosis -- UCLA trained a DNN to detect cancer cells!
The general idea of a DNN is that it learns through repetitive action from a collection of samples, like 100 pictures of different dogs, as opposed to a set of man-made rules, like "a dog has a black nose and floppy ears." In this way, a DNN learns in the same way the human brain does -- through practice and making mistakes.
In a hearing aid application, all sounds have an electronic signature that can be identified. Human speech is different from all other sounds. One company downloaded over 12 million environmental sounds to its DNN actually in the hearing aids. As the hearing aid is listening to sounds, when it hears background noise that is not human, it gently lowers the volume on the background noise and raises the sound of the human speech to help a patient hear better in challenging situations.
This past year, Danish scientists completed a 10-year study of the body language of people as we try to listen to others. They discovered the body gives very important clues as to the intent of the listener such as leaning the head in closer and exposing the left ear if that is the weaker side. These small things, plus how our heads turn in group conversations, along with the composition sounds in the room or outside were all studied and compiled into data that has now been turned into artificial intelligence data that causes the left hearing aid volume to automatically raise the volume on that weaker side. This technology is called 4D sensor artificial intelligence and yes, is all in that tiny little chip in that tiny little hearing aid!
Wind noise management is happening now with multiple microphones on the hearing aids that sense which microphone is being overwhelmed by the wind noise. It then automatically shifts to a microphone that is having less sound entering that microphone from the wind.
A similar concept is called spatial hearing technology. In normal hearing, the brain is constantly listening to sounds as to location and importance of our reaction. For instance, a young mother reading while she is listening quietly to her children playing in the yard is stirred from that book by a distress sound from her little ones. The location of that sound and the priority of response is all part of spatial hearing.
Hearing loss takes some of that localization from us. Hearing aids bring part of that back, but if one ear is worse than the other, getting back to a normal spatial hearing can be very difficult. In this spatial hearing technology, when the patient's two hearing instruments can exchange large amounts of data very quickly, new signal processing possibilities are opened up.
Complex signal processing is only available when using a high speed communication link between instruments.
Some manufacturers have chosen to use communication between instruments to create an artificial, situation specific, narrow directionality mode. In contrast, others use high speed data sharing to balance the gain and compression response between the two hearing instruments. This allows the instruments to preserve the on-going, ear-to-ear level differences in sound that are so vital to localization and then logically, the response priority.
The more easily a patient can identify various distinct sounds in the environment, the easier it is to distinguish between these sounds. They can then choose which one to attend to and which ones to ignore. The auditory system is a binaural system and spatial sound is designed to support the natural localization process. Again, amazing technology built into present day hearing aids.
Most of these features happen automatically so that you don't even notice them, but your brain certainly does get the information it needs to hear better.
If you have hearing loss see a hearing care professional soon to find out more about hearing aids.
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Jeff Bayliff is owner of Hear the Birds Hearing Aid Center.