CZ-Project NeuroSensEar

More than 11% of people in the EU are affected by hearing loss, but only 41% use a hearing aid due to continued problems with speech understanding and fitting the devices. The NeuroSensEar proket aims to improve the acceptance of and provision of hearing aids by significantly increasing their performance and greatly facilitating and automating their adaptation to the patient and different listening situations.

To achieve this, principles of biological information processing are integrated into hearing aid technology and interactive outputs for better listening comprehension are investigated, so that persons with hearing impairment largely regain their ability to perceive hearing.

The project is funded by the Carl Zeiss Foundation (Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung).

The aim is to significantly improve the acceptance and supply of hearing aids by significantly increasing their performance and greatly facilitating and automating their adaptation to the patient and different hearing situations. This will, in the long run, help to reduce the economic costs and the severe social consequences in terms of sustainable and efficient health care.

As a breakthrough, we aim to solve two main problems of current hearing aids:

1. hearing comprehension in difficult listening situations with many sound sources and low signal-to-noise ratios.

and

2. the lifelong ability to recognize, learn and act in new listening situations and demands, according to a continuous adaptation to the wearer and his/her hearing and the changing life/environment surrounding him/her.