In the large-scale collaborative research project NeuroSensEar, the Technische Universität Ilmenau is developing a biology-inspired technology that makes highly efficient hearing aids possible. People with hearing impairment should thus largely regain their ability to perceive hearing. The Carl Zeiss Foundation is funding the five-year research project, which starts in October and has a total volume of more than 5.5 million euros, with almost five million euros as part of the "CZS Breakthroughs" funding program. In addition to TU Ilmenau, the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT and the IMMS Institute for Microelectronic and Mechatronic Systems are involved in the project.
More than eleven percent of people in the European Union are affected by hearing loss, but only 41 percent of them use a hearing aid because they cannot understand speech satisfactorily even with a device. Others forgo a hearing aid because fitting by a professional is often costly and time-consuming. Conventional hearing aids analyze sound and emphasize important signals, especially speech, over unimportant signals and background noise, such as street noise or background sounds. To do this, all sound signals are filtered and analyzed. But hearing aids are reaching their limits.
Challenge for current hearing aids: filtering complex sound situations
The more sound sources there are, for example in train station halls or restaurants, the more difficult it is for hearing aids to separate the important signal speech from background noise. In addition, the programs that improve hearing perception even in such complex listening scenarios consume so much computing power and energy that they cannot be used in battery-powered hearing aids.
Goal: Increase acceptance of hearing aids through intelligent, adaptive sensor technology
The goal of the NeuroSensEar project ("Neuromorphic acoustic sensor technology for powerful hearing aids of tomorrow") is to increase the acceptance of hearing aids among the general public and thus improve care for people with hearing loss. At the heart of the innovativetechnology is an intelligent sensor that automatically adapts to the respective hearing situation and the individual hearing loss of the user. For this purpose, the sensor is equipped with a control system that reacts in real time to changing acoustic scenarios, for example in the living room or at the train station, and learns new hearing scenarios throughout its life. Its lifelong learning ability enables the sensor to pick up mainly the important signals more and more effectively: Speech signals, for example, would be picked up with higher gain and sensitivity, while background noise would be attenuated. By enabling better listening comprehension, future hearing systems would thus not only be more powerful: More computing power with the same, if not lower, energy consumption also makes them more efficient.
